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A silent e can occur after c at the end of a word or component root word part of a larger word. The e can serve a marking function indicating that the preceding c is soft, as in dance and enhancement. The silent e often additionally indicates that the vowel before c is a long vowel, as in rice, mace, and pacesetter.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ç , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. It is the non-sibilant equivalent of the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative. The symbol ç is the letter c with a cedilla ( ̧), as used to spell French and Portuguese words such as façade and ação.
Phonologically oriented (sound-oriented) spelling holds that every phoneme should correspond to a single grapheme. An example of pure phonological spelling is the word har. The word's three graphemes, har , each correspond to a single phoneme, /har/. [4] In Swedish, phonological spelling is used for vowels, with two exceptions.
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).
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 ...
From c. 100 BC onward ph , th and ch spread to a number of native Latin words as well, such as pulcher and lachrima. When this occurred it was nearly always in the vicinity of the consonant /r/ or /l/ , and the implication is that Latin /p/ , /t/ and /k/ had become aspirated in that context.
The sibilants /s/ (including ss, sc, c, and t) and /z/ (usually spelled s) are usually palatalized before the semivowel: /s/ > /ʃ/: cassia, fascia, species, militia /z/ > /ʒ/: amnesia, ambrosia; The vowels a, e, æ, and o in an open antepenult syllable become long if a semivowel appears in the next syllable: radius, Asia, azalea, area ...
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