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One of the noted difficulties of English spelling is a high number of silent letters. Edward Carney distinguishes different kinds of "silent" letters, which present differing degrees of difficulty to readers. Auxiliary letters which, with another letter, constitute digraphs; i.e., two letters combined which represent a single phoneme. These may ...
However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters.
A spelling alphabet is also often called a phonetic alphabet, especially by amateur radio enthusiasts, [1] recreational sailors in the US and Australia, [2] and NATO military organizations, [3] despite this usage of the term producing a naming collision with the usage of the same phrase in phonetics to mean a notation used for phonetic ...
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 ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 6 March 2025. Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters English alphabet An English-language pangram written with the FF Dax Regular typeface Script type Alphabet Time period c. 16th century – present Languages English Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto ...
Most of the letters of the BSL alphabet are produced with two hands but when one hand is occupied the dominant hand may fingerspell onto an imaginary subordinate hand and the word can be recognised by the movement. As with written words, the first and last letters and the length of the word are the most significant factors for recognition.
The Simpel-Fonetik alphabet is based on the Latin script, with the addition of three letters with diacritics: ä, ö, and ü (with umlaut). The alphabet does not include the letters c, q, x, or y, which are only used when writing unassimilated foreign terms or proper names. The 25-letter alphabet is: [3] [4]
Spelling may reflect a folk etymology (as in the English words hiccough and island, so spelt because of an imagined connection with the words cough and isle), or distant etymology (as in the English word debt in which the silent b was added under the influence of Latin).