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Silent letters are common in English and can make spelling and reading difficult. They can be auxiliary or dummy letters, and change the pronunciation of other letters. Some letters are silent in certain words but pronounced in others. Double letters can also create silent letters.
A silent letter is basically a letter found in a word that isn’t actually spoken when someone says that word out loud, but is crucial to spelling the word correctly. These types of letters are quite common in the English language and can make learning to spell and read quite problematic for many people. New readers and writers need to learn where the silent letters are, so they can pronounce a word correctly as they read it. A silent letter is typically silent only in certain situations and can even go from silent to spoken depending on how a word changes.
There are several ways a silent letter can be found in a word, depending on the language in use and how the different sounds are formed. These distinctions are largely academic, however, and a silent letter’s function is often to change the pronunciation of another letter within a word. When someone learns to read and write a language like English, it is imperative that they learn to recognize these letters and understand how to use them correctly in different words. In English, for example, many silent letters take the form of an auxiliary letter or a dummy letter.
An auxiliary letter is a type of silent letter used to form a digraph, which is a sound that cannot be created by a single letter or is created across two letters in certain situations. Sounds expressed as “-ng” or “th-” are often seen as digraphs formed through a combination of two letters where one can be seen as auxiliary. A silent letter in English can also be referred to as a “dummy letter,” which is an unpronounced letter and often helps change the sound of another letter. The silent “-e” at the end of many words such as “lane” and “brine” is an example of this type of letter.
There are also some linguistic situations where a letter may be a silent letter in certain words, while being pronounced in other similarly or identically formed words. The letter “b” in the word “comb”, for example, is silent; however, the same arrangement of the letters in “combine” causes the “b” to be pronounced. This can also be seen in the “n” and the ending of “condanna”, which is pronounced in “condanna”. A silent letter can also come from double letters or double sounds, such as the second ‘f’ in ‘cliff’ or the second ‘c’ in ‘clock’.
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