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Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same).
Conversely, gh is never pronounced /f/ in syllable onsets other than in inflected forms, and is almost never pronounced /ɡ/ in syllable codas (the proper name Pittsburgh is an exception). Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English
It is considered a single letter, called għajn (the same word for eye and spring, named for the corresponding Arabic letter ʿayn). It is usually silent, but it is necessary to be included because it changes the pronunciation of neighbouring letters, usually lengthening the succeeding vowels.
The pronunciation of the vowel of the prefix di-in words such as dichotomy, digest (verb), dilate, dilemma, dilute, diluvial, dimension, direct, dissect, disyllable, divagate, diverge, diverse, divert, divest, and divulge as well as their derivational forms vary between / aɪ / and / ɪ / or / ə / in both British and American English.
This is a sublist of List of irregularly spelled English names. These common suffixes have the following regular pronunciations, which are historic, well established and etymologically consistent. However, they may be counterintuitive, as their pronunciation is inconsistent with the usual phonetics of English. -b(o)rough and -burgh – / b ər ə /
Throughout Wikipedia, the pronunciation of words is indicated using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The following tables list the IPA symbols used for English words and pronunciations. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to Wikipedia, and differ from those used by dictionaries.
In most cases, the English pronunciation of Classical words and names is predictable from the orthography, as long as long and short vowels are distinguishable in the source. For Latin, Latinized Greek or for long versus short α, ι, υ Greek vowels, this means that macrons and breves must be used if the pronunciation is to be unambiguous.
The affricate [dʒ] was always phonetically long between vowels; [14] it could also occur after /n/ or at the end of a word. There seems to have been no merge between [dʒ] and [j] at the end of a word, so there was a distinction in pronunciation between weġ 'way', pronounced [wej], and weċġ 'wedge', pronounced [wedːʒ] [15] or [wedʒ].