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In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
A silent e , in association with the Latin alphabet's five vowel characters, is one of the ways by which some of these vowel sounds are represented in English orthography. A silent e in association with the other vowels may convert a short vowel sound to a long vowel
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 ...
The letter א aleph is a zero consonant in Ashkenazi Hebrew. It originally represented a glottal stop, a value it retains in other Hebrew dialects and in formal Israeli Hebrew. In Arabic, the non-hamzated letter ا alif is often a placeholder for an initial vowel. In Javanese script, the letter ꦲ ha is used for a vowel (silent 'h').
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of knight, Knoten which is a cognate of knot, etc. Likewise, g was probably a voiced velar plosive and the initial g was not silent: for example, German Gnom , a cognate of gnome , Gneis , a cognate of gneiss , etc.
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The letter occurs very regularly at the end of words, where it represents the long final vowels o/a or e. In the middle of the word, the letter represents either a glottal stop between vowels (but West Syriac pronunciation often makes it a palatal approximant), a long i/e (less commonly o/a) or is silent.