Letter (alphabet)A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. The word letter, borrowed from Old French letre, entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the Old English term bōcstæf (bookstaff). Letter is descended from the Latin littera, which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (, writing tablet), via Etruscan.
Portuguese phonologyThe phonology of Portuguese varies among dialects, in extreme cases leading to some difficulties in intelligibility. Portuguese is a pluricentric language and has some of the most diverse sound variations in any language. This article on phonology focuses on the pronunciations that are generally regarded as standard. Since Portuguese is a pluricentric language—and differences between European Portuguese (EP), Brazilian Portuguese (BP), and Angolan Portuguese (AP) can be considerable—varieties are distinguished whenever necessary.
BB, or b, is the second letter of the Latin-script alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee (pronounced 'biː), plural bees. It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants. The Roman derived from the Greek capital beta via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt .
English orthographyEnglish orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardisation. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century.
Phonemic orthographyA phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is.
Vowel reductionIn phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language), and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well. Vowels which have undergone vowel reduction may be called reduced or weak. In contrast, an unreduced vowel may be described as full or strong. There are several ways to distinguish full and reduced vowels in transcription.
Silent eIn English orthography, many words feature a silent (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 sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift, the presence of a suffix on the end of a word influenced the development of the preceding vowel, and in a smaller number of cases it affected the pronunciation of a preceding consonant.
ØØ (or minuscule: ø) is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø and œ, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an [oe] diphthong. The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents (see usage). Among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed O" or "o with stroke".
Irish languageIrish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge), also known as Gaelic 'geilIk, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century. Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in areas of Ireland collectively known as the Gaeltacht, in which only 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2016.
Portuguese orthographyPortuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes. The spelling of Portuguese is largely phonemic, but some phonemes can be spelled in more than one way.
