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Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
Phonetic pitch and phonemic tone may be indicated by either diacritics placed over the nucleus of the syllable – e.g., high-pitch é – or by Chao tone letters placed either before or after the word or syllable. There are three graphic variants of the tone letters: with or without a stave, and facing left or facing right from the stave.
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [87]
As a result, there is a somewhat regular system of pronouncing "foreign" words in English, [citation needed] and some borrowed words have had their spelling changed to conform to this system. For example, Hindu used to be spelled Hindoo , and the name Maria used to be pronounced like the name Mariah , but was changed to conform to this system.
It may be placed after an initial letter used to abbreviate a word. It is often placed after each individual letter in acronyms and initialisms (e.g., "U.S."). However, the use of full stops after letters in an initialism or acronym is declining, and many of these without punctuation have become accepted norms (e.g., "UK" and "NATO").
After this, the combinations /aulk/ and /ɔulk/ lose their /l/ in most accents, affecting words like talk, caulk, and folk. Words acquired after this change (such as talc) were not affected. Before /f, v/, the /l/ becomes silent, so that half and calf are pronounced with /af/, and salve and halve are pronounced with /av/.
The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the centuries that followed, various letters entered or fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:
A spelling alphabet (also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them.