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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 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 song The Gnu jokes about this silent g and other silent letters in English. In fact the g in gnu may always have been silent in English, since this loanword did not enter the language until the late 18th century. The trumpeter Kenny Wheeler wrote a composition titled Gnu High, a pun on "new high". S-cluster reductions
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.
In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English . In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical ...
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).