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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. Silent letters may help the reader to stress the correct syllable (compare physics to physiques). The final fe in giraffe gives a clue to the second-syllable stress, where *giraf might suggest initial-stress.
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 ...
NG-coalescence. NG-coalescence is a historical sound change by which the final cluster /nɡ/, pronounced [ŋɡ] (the /n/ being realized as a velar nasal by assimilation with the velar /ɡ/ ), came to be pronounced as just [ŋ] – that is, the final [ɡ] was dropped, but the velar quality of the nasal remained.
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 ...
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. [1] Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and ...
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century.
Irish orthography is the set of conventions used to write Irish. A spelling reform in the mid-20th century led to An Caighdeán Oifigiúil, the modern standard written form used by the Government of Ireland, which regulates both spelling and grammar. [1] The reform removed inter-dialectal silent letters, simplified some letter sequences, and ...
List of irregularly spelled English names. This is a set of lists of English personal and place names having spellings that are counterintuitive to their pronunciation because the spelling does not accord with conventional pronunciation associations. Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages.