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Silent letters can distinguish between homophones; e.g., in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already familiar with both words. Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word; e.g., vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would.
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk , half , calf , etc., the w in two and sword , gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though , daughter , night , brought , and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling ...
/ ˈ l ɔːr d w eɪ z / Australia: Lalor: like Lawlor / ˈ l ɔː l ər / Australia: Launceston: LON-səs-tən / ˈ l ɒ n s ə s t ən / Ireland: Leap: LEP / l ɛ p / Ireland: Leighlin: LOKH-lin / ˈ l ɒ x l ɪ n / Ireland: Leighlinbridge: LOKH-lin-brij / ˈ l ɒ x l ɪ n b r ɪ dʒ / Ireland: Leinster: LEN-stər / ˈ l ɛ n s t ər / New ...
In the dominant dialects of modern English, gh is almost always either silent or pronounced /f/ (see Ough). It is thought that before disappearing, the sound became partially or completely voiced to [ɣx] or [ɣ], which would explain the new spelling — Old English used a simple h — and the diphthongization of any preceding vowel.
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 ...
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