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Silent letters can distinguish between homophones, e.g. in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already familiar with both words. Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word; e.g. vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would.
Category:Silent letters. Category. : Silent letters. Silent aleph and silent aliph / alif - see Silent letter#Semitic languages.
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 ...
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 Maltese language has a related digraph, għ . 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.
Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger), the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for Führer.
This is a list of letters of the Cyrillic script. The definition of a Cyrillic letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode standard that a has script property of 'Cyrillic' and the general category of 'Letter'. An overview of the distribution of Cyrillic letters in Unicode is given in Cyrillic script in Unicode.
The Simplified Spelling Board was an American organization created in 1906 to reform the spelling of the English language, making it simpler and easier to learn, and eliminating many of what were considered to be its inconsistencies. The board operated until 1920, the year after the death of its founding benefactor, who had come to criticize ...