In English, Arabic numerals are typically used instead of letters. This applies to Roman numerals and the letters of other writing systems. Letters may also have a numerical or quantitative value. An example is the combination sch in German. A phoneme can also be represented by three letters, called a trigraph. Examples of digraphs in English include ch, sh, and th. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph. Conversely, the same phoneme may be shared by more than one letter, as shown by the c and s in fence and tense. Regional accents have a significant effect the letter a can range from five to twelve sounds depending on the origin of the speaker. As an example of positional effects, the letter c is pronounced before a, o, u, or consonants (e.g. critical), but is pronounced before e, i, or y (e.g. democracy). There are more sounds, or phonemes, in English–about 44–than there are letters of the alphabet. A letter may therefore be associated with more than one phoneme, with the phoneme determined by the surrounding letters or etymology of the word. In a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, although in history and in practice letters often indicate more than one phoneme. In English, n and ñ are classified alike.Īs symbols that indicate segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics. In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a separate letter, sorted after n. As elements of alphabets, letters have prescribed orders, although this too may vary by language. Letters have specific names associated with them, which may differ with language, dialect, and history. Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the US, where it is named zee. Some versions contain as few as twenty-one characters, some as many as thirty. The basic Roman alphabet is used by about one hundred languages, with slight variations. A letter is classed as either a consonant or a vowel, depending on how its sound is produced (vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and w). Each letter corresponds to one or more sounds, and the letters are combined in the order of sounds to make words. The contemporary English-language alphabet, known as Roman style, consists of twenty-six letters. Written signs in other writing systems are called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which indicate a word or phrase). Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent, exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. It is a visual representation of the smallest unit of spoken sound. A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing.
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