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Not all silent letters are completely redundant: 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.
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 ...
Category:Silent letters. Category. : Silent letters. Silent aleph and silent aliph / alif - see Silent letter#Semitic languages.
The sound of a hard g (which often precedes the non-front vowels a o u or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive [ɡ] (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft g (typically before i , e , or y ) may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft g is the affricate / dʒ /, as in general, giant ...
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 ...
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.
Not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, but occurs at the beginning of the word, as in the dialects ’Bulengee and ’Dolimi. Because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the ...
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.