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The kn and gn letter combinations usually indicate a Germanic origin of the word. In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic. For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of ...
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).
The change affected words like gnat, gnostic, gnome, etc., the spelling with gn-being retained despite the loss of the /ɡ/ sound. The cluster is preserved in some Scots dialects. [23] The song The Gnu jokes about this silent g and other silent letters in English.
English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, [ 1][ 2] allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. [ 3] It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation . Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad ...
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 ...
Reduction of /wr/ to /r/, in words like wrap, around the 17th century (there was also a reduction of /wl/ to /l/ in Middle English). Reduction of /kn/ and /ɡn/ to /n/, in words like knot and gnome, around the 17th century. S-cluster reduction, in some types of Caribbean English, where for example spit is pronounced pit.
A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of a speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound.
The phrase “low-key” expresses a lackluster feeling that’s analogous to “sort of." Depending on where you look, low-key can be spelled as one word, two words or as a hyphenated phrase ...