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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. Silent letters may help the reader to stress the correct syllable (compare physics to physiques ). The ...
The kn and gn letter combinations usually indicate a Germanic origin of the word. In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic. For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of ...
English rarely uses diacritics, which are symbols indicating the modification of a letter's sound when spoken. [1] Most of the affected words are in terms imported from other languages. [2] The two dots accent (diaeresis or umlaut), the grave accent and the acute accent are the only diacritics native to Modern English, and their usage has tended to fall off except in certain publications and ...
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).
H-dropping or aitch-dropping is the deletion of the voiceless glottal fricative or " H -sound", [h]. The phenomenon is common in many dialects of English, and is also found in certain other languages, either as a purely historical development or as a contemporary difference between dialects. Although common in most regions of England and in ...
In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter g is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft g . The sound of a hard g (which often precedes the non-front vowels a o u or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive [ɡ] (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft g (typically before i , e , or y ) may ...
List of irregularly spelled English names. This is a set of lists of English personal and place names having spellings that are counterintuitive to their pronunciation because the spelling does not accord with conventional pronunciation associations. Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages.