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Letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. For instance, d occurs with greater frequency in fiction, as most fiction is written in past tense and thus most verbs will end in the inflectional suffix -ed / -d. One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using x frequently. Different authors have ...
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]
When an abbreviation appears at the end of a sentence, only one period is used: The capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. In the past, some initialisms were styled with a period after each letter and a space between each pair. For example, U. S., but today this is typically US.
Gemination is found across words and across morphemes when the last consonant in a given word and the first consonant in the following word are the same fricative, nasal, or stop. [11] For instance: b: subbasement [ˈsʌb.beɪs.mənt] d: midday [ˈmɪdˌdeɪ] f: life force [ˈlaɪfˌfɔ(ɹ)s] g: egg girl [ˈɛɡ.ɡɝl] k: bookkeeper ...
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"). [b]
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The letter Y when introduced was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages ...