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In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme.Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English.
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205 ∅ EMPTY SET , which resembles the Scandinavian letter Ø .
Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger), the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. [13] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for ...
Infixation: the insertion of a morpheme within a word; Metathesis: the reordering of sounds within a word; Paragoge: the addition of a sound to the end of a word; Prothesis: the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word; Tmesis: the inclusion of a whole word within another one
In English orthography, the letter k normally reflects the pronunciation of [] and the letter g normally is pronounced /ɡ/ or "hard" g , as in goose, gargoyle and game; /d͡ʒ/ or "soft" g , generally before i or e , as in giant, ginger and geology; or /ʒ/ in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre.
Sh is not considered a distinct letter for collation purposes. American Literary braille includes a single-cell contraction for the digraph with the dot pattern (1 4 6). In isolation it stands for the word "shall". In Old English orthography, the sound /ʃ/ was written sc .
The change took place in educated London speech around the end of the 16th century, and explains why there is no [ɡ] sound at the end of words like fang, sing, wrong and tongue in the standard varieties of Modern English. [28] The change in fact applies not only at the end of a word, but generally at the end of a morpheme.
Until the 17th century, words like happy could end with the vowel of my (originally [iː], but it was diphthongised in the Great Vowel Shift), which alternated with a short i sound. (Many words spelt -ee, -ea, -ey once had the vowel of day; there is still alternation between that vowel and the happy vowel in words such as Sunday and Monday ...