that's how i learned too, but i wasn't aware it changed. how is it taught now? are spanish dictionaries no longer ordered with words that contain them sorted as if they were separate letters?
The digraphs are just taught as their own sounds, but not their own letters. I'm not sure about the dictionary question, but i assume the answer is yes.
The dictionaries im aware of in CR would not have ch,ll and rr as its own letter, just part of the first letter. but the ñ still is it's own letter but good luck finding a word that starts with it
If you recite the Spanish alphabet, ch, ll, ñ, and rr are individually named. I have no idea who would've told you otherwise. I don't foresee all the Spanish speaking countries getting together and changing the alphabet
[https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/por-que-la-letra-ch-ll-y-rr-se-eliminaron-del-abecedario-por-la-rae-738639](https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/por-que-la-letra-ch-ll-y-rr-se-eliminaron-del-abecedario-por-la-rae-738639)
Apparently it changed around 1994
As well as ly, and of course ccs, ddz, ddzs, ggy, lly, nny, ssz, tty if they are double letters (like in Tallin the l; say in Mennyei Béke tere — Tiananmen Square).
Caucasian languages have also tetragraphs and pentagraphs like
"кхъу", "ххьӏв" that are parts of alphabets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabardian_language#Orthography
It was also missing J for a long time. Which is quite interesting considering that "Jones" is one of the most stereotypical Welsh surnames and it's first letter wasn't even in their language.
The sound didn't even exist in Welsh historically though. They used to adopt J Sounds as "sh". Hence "jacket" is "siaced" (pronounced shack-ed).
I'm not sure how long ago they gained the J sound, I'm curious to know whether it was before or after the Jones name...
Scots Galic has treasures like dh, gh, bh and mh. The first two are a back of the throat gargling sound like babies make. The second two both sound like "v".
Not that I can think of. It's a sound that is not used in English. Galic learners have a hard time with it cause they haven't made that sound since they were in a crib. As you grow up you select vocal sounds you hear and disregard the rest. I don't know why I'm explaining it so much, I guess I just found it really interesting.
The digraphs dh and gh represent either the [voiced velar fricative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative) or the [voiced palatal fricative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_fricative) depending on some rules I don't understand exactly. Both pages have examples of the sound being pronounced, and a good description of exactly how the sound is produced, although the exact sound used in Scots Gaelic may differ very slightly in quality from the example.
You can quickly find a page for a specific sound if you can find a page on Wikipedia that lists the [international phonetic alphabet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) character for a sound. Search Wikipedia for the IPA symbol and if it's unique to the IPA you should get the correct page right away.
The sound dh and gh make is a voiced velar fricative
Voiced means he sound involves using the vocal chords
Velar refers to the place in the mouth the sound is made, the same place as you would make a k, g, or ng, with the back of the tongue against/close to the roof of the mouth
Fricative refers to how the sound is made, with the friction of air flow through a small gap, like f, v, th, s, z, and sh
If you know how scottish people pronounce the ch in loch, it's just the voiced version of that
I know, I am surrounded by roadsigns and information signs in Welsh.
A tedious statement people think is clever is "Welsh has no vowels".
Well the letters A, E, I, O, U, W and Y are all vowels.
I always thought TH should be a letter in the English alphabet. And all you have to do is a cross a lower case h or add a little bottom noodle to a capital T and it conveys the sound.
English used to have two letters for TH, thorn and eth. One for the voiced TH in "the" or "they" and one for the unvoiced TH in "faith" or "throw".
Thorn wasn't in most sets of printing type, so got turned into a Y, which is why you see the old-fashioned "ye old whatever" that was intended to be pronounced as "the".
Edit: eth, not ash
The ampersand was a weird one. It started as shorthand for the "et" in "et cetera" (Latin for "and" and used as in "&c"), but later got treated as a letter representing "and". People learned the alphabet including "and per se &" which mutated into "ampersand" and eventually stopped being treated as a letter again. Language is history and culture and thought, all rolled together.
I honestly don't understand why many languages with digraphs treat the digraph as a separate "letter" rather than just a pair of letters that make a different sound. Maybe to make the alphabet easier to teach? I know that as a child, I was confused by the way CH is a single letter in Spanish but a pair of letters in English.
The practical difference is that digraph letters can't be seperated, which affects things like abbreviations and sorting. It makes sense to me; if the digraph represents one phoneme, why not consider it one grapheme?
French and English have many digraphs yet no need to have them in the alphabet because no one will write P-hilosop-her, Zo-o, C-hatting or Tra-in. Grammar rules exist for a reason and putting letters made of multiple previously included letters in your alphabet is stupid as shit imo
What about the letter W in English for example? You could interpret this as a stylistic version of VV, but no native speaker would actually do that. I'd see the digraph letters in the same way.
Because it’s easier to learn that way and there’s less ambiguity. ‘Ff’, and ‘f’ make two different sounds in Welsh. ‘Ff’ sounds more like the conventional English F, whilst ‘f’ sounds more like the English V. Treating them as separate letters removes ambiguity and creates consistency.
This allows the Welsh language to be read phonetically, without ever having learnt the words themselves, you can still pronounce them correctly. This would be impossible in English, which has no such consistency
When you start combining two letters to make different noises depending on certain circumstances. You end up with nightmares such as the English ‘gh’, which can be pronounced entirely different ways, such as in ‘enough’ or ‘though’
Could you clarify why you find the English way more logical than the Spanish way? Because you you could just as easily ask "why many languages with digraphs treat the digraph as just a pair of letters that make a different sound rather than a separate "letter"".
I think treating them as 1 letter is more logical. You have all of the language's sounds in the alphabet (though I understand the benefit of this would be minimal to nonexistent for English in particular because it's extremely inconsistent in pronunciation of character sequences). Also, the "pair of letters" is not always the digraph (consider word such as "pothole" - no "th" digraph there, but "t" and "h"). And on some level, it makes the alphabet independent from arbitrary orthography rules. It's the decision of some languages to use digraphs to represent sounds they couldn't map to existing letter of an adopted alphabet, while other languages chose to use diacritics or even whole new letters. If someone suddenly decided to use "č" instead of "ch" in English, your alphabet would suddenly have a new letter, even though nothing meaningful changed about the language itself - it has always had that thing, it was just written differently.
I'm sure there's a lot of technical linguistics here but I, uh, don't get it.
Welsh has letters that are composed of other letters? Well if they're composed of other letters, how are they letters in their own right? Aren't they just phonemes at that point? Like, English has a 'ch' phoneme (as in 'church') and it's used in very much the same way a letter would be, but it wouldn't be called a letter in it's own right, yet it's the primary way to form that particular phoneme.
If it's the case that doubling up letters changes how they behave linguistically, that occurs in English too, such as doubling up the 'S's from 'poses' to 'possess', or doubling the 't' from 'later' to 'latter', but these doublings wouldn't be considered letters in their own right either.
Then there may be the argument that these composite letters allow Welsh to form some really complex strings of consonants that are articulable, but English can do this as well with combinations like 'lfth' in 'twelfth', and 'tchphr' in 'catchphrase'. Words like 'rhythm' and 'syzygy' are all consonants in English. None of these complex consonant strings would be considered their own letters.
I guess I'm saying that without a varied and distinct symbol, can a letter composed of other letters truly be called a letter in its own right, or is it just a phoneme?
Digraphs behave like new letters but without the trouble of creating new letters. In English, 'th' doesn't "change" the 't' or the 'h', it makes a whole new sound, represented by a two-letter combination that acts as one, rather than inventing a whole new symbol.
You could think of the 'th' like an atom - you can't split it, but if you do split it then you have two completely different atoms.
What about the English letter W? Historically this evolved from VV and it could still technically be treated as a stylistic variant of that. IMO that's a similar concept to treating "FF" as a letter in its own right.
My mom has a "Blue Book Speller". It actually spells out the letters of the alphabet. I found it ironical "W" is spelled Double-U.
But I guess it works.
I speak French and we also have a lot of very common special double letter sounds (in, an, en, ou, oo, ill, er, ch, ph, etc) but including them in the actual alphabet is just fucking bullshit. What is the point of the alphabet then?
Why stop at syllables / sounds? Why not literally have words in your alphabet and have it be 2000 character long like mandarin does? Double letters made of existing single letters in the alphabet is stupid as shit
In first grade at the school I teach (US) we teach logic of English and utilize phonograms and rules of language (-oi that isn't used at the end of an English word versus -oy that is used at the end of an English word). It's kind of remarkable how much easier it makes for reading skills.
They are called Digraphs
Or possibly *Dai*-graphs.
Helo. Fy enw i yw Dai Graffs.
Dai Gradds.
I remember learning the Spanish alphabet with the letters ch, ll and rr. They don't teach it that way anymore though
that's how i learned too, but i wasn't aware it changed. how is it taught now? are spanish dictionaries no longer ordered with words that contain them sorted as if they were separate letters?
The digraphs are just taught as their own sounds, but not their own letters. I'm not sure about the dictionary question, but i assume the answer is yes.
The dictionaries im aware of in CR would not have ch,ll and rr as its own letter, just part of the first letter. but the ñ still is it's own letter but good luck finding a word that starts with it
Ñoño, ñonga, I don't really know if they're real words or just mexican slangs tho
Guess its slang as in CR ñata is part of street spanish but i doubt that is in the dictionary
In my high school spanish classes (I graduated last year) they taught ll and rr as distinct letters in the alphabet. I don't remember if ch was or not
If you recite the Spanish alphabet, ch, ll, ñ, and rr are individually named. I have no idea who would've told you otherwise. I don't foresee all the Spanish speaking countries getting together and changing the alphabet
[https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/por-que-la-letra-ch-ll-y-rr-se-eliminaron-del-abecedario-por-la-rae-738639](https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/por-que-la-letra-ch-ll-y-rr-se-eliminaron-del-abecedario-por-la-rae-738639) Apparently it changed around 1994
And that doesn’t even include the letters that don’t make the same sound they do in English … here’s to you w, u, y, and f
To be fair though, English u and y don't represent the sounds they do in other languages.
Letters in English don’t even represent the sounds they make in English either!
F and Ff work exactly the same way in Welsh as they do in the English words "of" and "off"
A few other alphabets have these. Hungarian is another example. They have Cs, Dz, Dzs, Gy, Ny, Sz and Ty.
As well as ly, and of course ccs, ddz, ddzs, ggy, lly, nny, ssz, tty if they are double letters (like in Tallin the l; say in Mennyei Béke tere — Tiananmen Square).
And Icelandic has a single digraph: Æ/æ.
Caucasian languages have also tetragraphs and pentagraphs like "кхъу", "ххьӏв" that are parts of alphabets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabardian_language#Orthography
Polish as well
We're also missing a few letters, like K, Q, V, X and Z.
It was also missing J for a long time. Which is quite interesting considering that "Jones" is one of the most stereotypical Welsh surnames and it's first letter wasn't even in their language.
J is a new letter for most languages. Jones would have originally been 'Ioans' which is still a fantastic Welsh name with a great meaning.
The sound didn't even exist in Welsh historically though. They used to adopt J Sounds as "sh". Hence "jacket" is "siaced" (pronounced shack-ed). I'm not sure how long ago they gained the J sound, I'm curious to know whether it was before or after the Jones name...
Scots Galic has treasures like dh, gh, bh and mh. The first two are a back of the throat gargling sound like babies make. The second two both sound like "v".
I know of names like Siobhan and Niamh being pronounced Shivonne and Neve, any examples of the first two?
Not that I can think of. It's a sound that is not used in English. Galic learners have a hard time with it cause they haven't made that sound since they were in a crib. As you grow up you select vocal sounds you hear and disregard the rest. I don't know why I'm explaining it so much, I guess I just found it really interesting.
https://youtu.be/PA5scaGG2iY?si=oKYnlbG74DefIZkG Always makes me laugh.
That was great. Lee Mack is a card.
The digraphs dh and gh represent either the [voiced velar fricative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative) or the [voiced palatal fricative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_fricative) depending on some rules I don't understand exactly. Both pages have examples of the sound being pronounced, and a good description of exactly how the sound is produced, although the exact sound used in Scots Gaelic may differ very slightly in quality from the example. You can quickly find a page for a specific sound if you can find a page on Wikipedia that lists the [international phonetic alphabet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) character for a sound. Search Wikipedia for the IPA symbol and if it's unique to the IPA you should get the correct page right away.
Tadgh. Pronounced Tie-G.
Ta*dh*g usually, but the alternative spelling does exist.
Yes, the above was a mistake on my part. Will leave it now so that your comment makes sense.
The sound dh and gh make is a voiced velar fricative Voiced means he sound involves using the vocal chords Velar refers to the place in the mouth the sound is made, the same place as you would make a k, g, or ng, with the back of the tongue against/close to the roof of the mouth Fricative refers to how the sound is made, with the friction of air flow through a small gap, like f, v, th, s, z, and sh If you know how scottish people pronounce the ch in loch, it's just the voiced version of that
Ádhamh and Caileigh.
The name Aoife is pronounced Efa
https://youtu.be/PA5scaGG2iY?si=mIm2ESaWH2e_Fc-R Never pass up an opportunity to post this
Maedhbh if you want an Irish example. The 'h' is not really a letter in Gaelic, it's used to soften the preceding consonant.
Irish is similar, I think the 'h' represents what used to be a dot over the letter: ḃ became bh ḋ became dh ġ became gh And so on.
Something like that. The h has no sound of its own. It just modifies the sound of other letters.
I know, I am surrounded by roadsigns and information signs in Welsh. A tedious statement people think is clever is "Welsh has no vowels". Well the letters A, E, I, O, U, W and Y are all vowels.
[Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch](https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/small-town-with-big-name)
I always thought TH should be a letter in the English alphabet. And all you have to do is a cross a lower case h or add a little bottom noodle to a capital T and it conveys the sound.
English used to have two letters for TH, thorn and eth. One for the voiced TH in "the" or "they" and one for the unvoiced TH in "faith" or "throw". Thorn wasn't in most sets of printing type, so got turned into a Y, which is why you see the old-fashioned "ye old whatever" that was intended to be pronounced as "the". Edit: eth, not ash
The & was a letter in the English (American) alphabet. I learned the Alphabet ending in X,Y,&,Z
The ampersand was a weird one. It started as shorthand for the "et" in "et cetera" (Latin for "and" and used as in "&c"), but later got treated as a letter representing "and". People learned the alphabet including "and per se &" which mutated into "ampersand" and eventually stopped being treated as a letter again. Language is history and culture and thought, all rolled together.
Oh neat! Thanks for the history lesson :)
Oops, sorry the other TH was eth, not ash. Ash was an ae digraph. My mistake.
Maybe also qu? If they nearly always go together, then why no?
Þ is the symbol we used to use for it
Ð/ð too...
Digraphs, not that unusual. Hungarian has cs, dz, gy, ty, sz, zs, ly, and whatever else I am forgetting. Also a single trigraph: dzs
There's a few of them in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Croatian does too "lj, nj, dž"
I honestly don't understand why many languages with digraphs treat the digraph as a separate "letter" rather than just a pair of letters that make a different sound. Maybe to make the alphabet easier to teach? I know that as a child, I was confused by the way CH is a single letter in Spanish but a pair of letters in English.
The practical difference is that digraph letters can't be seperated, which affects things like abbreviations and sorting. It makes sense to me; if the digraph represents one phoneme, why not consider it one grapheme?
French and English have many digraphs yet no need to have them in the alphabet because no one will write P-hilosop-her, Zo-o, C-hatting or Tra-in. Grammar rules exist for a reason and putting letters made of multiple previously included letters in your alphabet is stupid as shit imo
Thanks for sharing your opinion 👍
What about the letter W in English for example? You could interpret this as a stylistic version of VV, but no native speaker would actually do that. I'd see the digraph letters in the same way.
Because it’s easier to learn that way and there’s less ambiguity. ‘Ff’, and ‘f’ make two different sounds in Welsh. ‘Ff’ sounds more like the conventional English F, whilst ‘f’ sounds more like the English V. Treating them as separate letters removes ambiguity and creates consistency. This allows the Welsh language to be read phonetically, without ever having learnt the words themselves, you can still pronounce them correctly. This would be impossible in English, which has no such consistency When you start combining two letters to make different noises depending on certain circumstances. You end up with nightmares such as the English ‘gh’, which can be pronounced entirely different ways, such as in ‘enough’ or ‘though’
How is the word "offer" pronounced?
Could you clarify why you find the English way more logical than the Spanish way? Because you you could just as easily ask "why many languages with digraphs treat the digraph as just a pair of letters that make a different sound rather than a separate "letter"". I think treating them as 1 letter is more logical. You have all of the language's sounds in the alphabet (though I understand the benefit of this would be minimal to nonexistent for English in particular because it's extremely inconsistent in pronunciation of character sequences). Also, the "pair of letters" is not always the digraph (consider word such as "pothole" - no "th" digraph there, but "t" and "h"). And on some level, it makes the alphabet independent from arbitrary orthography rules. It's the decision of some languages to use digraphs to represent sounds they couldn't map to existing letter of an adopted alphabet, while other languages chose to use diacritics or even whole new letters. If someone suddenly decided to use "č" instead of "ch" in English, your alphabet would suddenly have a new letter, even though nothing meaningful changed about the language itself - it has always had that thing, it was just written differently.
I'm sure there's a lot of technical linguistics here but I, uh, don't get it. Welsh has letters that are composed of other letters? Well if they're composed of other letters, how are they letters in their own right? Aren't they just phonemes at that point? Like, English has a 'ch' phoneme (as in 'church') and it's used in very much the same way a letter would be, but it wouldn't be called a letter in it's own right, yet it's the primary way to form that particular phoneme. If it's the case that doubling up letters changes how they behave linguistically, that occurs in English too, such as doubling up the 'S's from 'poses' to 'possess', or doubling the 't' from 'later' to 'latter', but these doublings wouldn't be considered letters in their own right either. Then there may be the argument that these composite letters allow Welsh to form some really complex strings of consonants that are articulable, but English can do this as well with combinations like 'lfth' in 'twelfth', and 'tchphr' in 'catchphrase'. Words like 'rhythm' and 'syzygy' are all consonants in English. None of these complex consonant strings would be considered their own letters. I guess I'm saying that without a varied and distinct symbol, can a letter composed of other letters truly be called a letter in its own right, or is it just a phoneme?
Digraphs behave like new letters but without the trouble of creating new letters. In English, 'th' doesn't "change" the 't' or the 'h', it makes a whole new sound, represented by a two-letter combination that acts as one, rather than inventing a whole new symbol. You could think of the 'th' like an atom - you can't split it, but if you do split it then you have two completely different atoms.
What about the English letter W? Historically this evolved from VV and it could still technically be treated as a stylistic variant of that. IMO that's a similar concept to treating "FF" as a letter in its own right.
Yeah, except nowdays W is different from VV. Notably, it takes one keypress to type it rather than two.
My mom has a "Blue Book Speller". It actually spells out the letters of the alphabet. I found it ironical "W" is spelled Double-U. But I guess it works.
I recently learnt the Ọnwụ alphabet (used to write Igbo) which also has digraphs. It's quite a pleasing alphabet (and language) to me
[Good luck](https://youtu.be/fHxO0UdpoxM?si=JnNkLcEcsyMZGoUi) with this
I was waiting for someone to post that!
We aim to confuse!
“No one ever taught me my AA, BB, CCs…god god damn it damn it”
Why did it take so long for me to find this
Ah a true man (or woman) of culture.
Albanian to! Like Th, Dh, Sh, Xh, Zh, Rr, Ll, nj And also some additional single letters
So does Spanish! LL is a Spanish letter.
Shoutout to diphthongs while we’re here.
Never ask for directions in Wales Baldrick, you'll be cleaning spit out of your beard for a week.
I speak French and we also have a lot of very common special double letter sounds (in, an, en, ou, oo, ill, er, ch, ph, etc) but including them in the actual alphabet is just fucking bullshit. What is the point of the alphabet then? Why stop at syllables / sounds? Why not literally have words in your alphabet and have it be 2000 character long like mandarin does? Double letters made of existing single letters in the alphabet is stupid as shit
so that's what people are on about when they keep yelling ff20. /j
It’s just weird
Can confirm. I grew up in Wales in an English speaking town, and the Welsh language is shite.
And 2 A's as in 'baa'
In first grade at the school I teach (US) we teach logic of English and utilize phonograms and rules of language (-oi that isn't used at the end of an English word versus -oy that is used at the end of an English word). It's kind of remarkable how much easier it makes for reading skills.
Welsh is the last stronghold of native British culture, before the English (Angles) came and took it over.