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[3] At points where two sounds share an intersection, the left is unrounded, and the right is rounded which refers to the shape of the lips while making the sound. [4] For example, [i] and [y] at the top left corner are such a pair.
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (abbreviated AHD) uses a phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet to transcribe the pronunciation of spoken English. It and similar respelling systems, such as those used by the Merriam-Webster and Random House dictionaries, are familiar to US schoolchildren.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Old English on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Old English in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Superscript letters can be meaningfully modified by combining diacritics, just as baseline letters can. For example, a superscript dental nasal in ⁿ̪d̪ , a superscript voiceless velar nasal in ᵑ̊ǂ , and labial-velar prenasalization in ᵑ͡ᵐɡ͡b .
Pronunciation can also vary greatly among dialects of a language. Standard orthography in some languages, such as English and Tibetan, is often irregular and makes it difficult to predict pronunciation from spelling.
When describing syllable structure, a capital letter C can be used to represent a consonant sound and a capital letter V can be used to represent a vowel sound, so a syllable such as 'be' is described as having CV structure (one consonant followed by one vowel). The IPA symbol that shows a division between syllables is the dot [.].
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.