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These ligatures are proper letters in some Scandinavian languages, and so are used to render names from those languages, and likewise names from Old English. Some American spellings replace ligatured vowels with a single letter; for example, gynæcology or gynaecology is spelled gynecology .
In Old English, the runic letter wynn Ƿ ) was used, but Norman influence forced wynn out of use. By the 14th century, the "new" letter W , originated as two V glyphs or U glyphs joined, developed into a legitimate letter with its own position in the alphabet. Because of its relative youth compared to other letters of the alphabet, only a few ...
Conversely, to soften c or g (to /tʃ/ or /dʒ/ respectively) before a back vowel ( a , o , u ), a silent i is inserted: –cio– , –giu– , etc. When i in that position is not silent, it can be marked with a grave accent: ì . Before any other letter, or at the end of a word, the i is not silent.
many five-letter words in consonant-vowel shape CCVCV or CVCCV; many short words with apostrophes between vowels, like ko'a pi'o etc.; usually no punctuation except for dots; may use commas in the middle of words (typically proper nouns).
This is partly due to the large number of words that have been loaned from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms, [5] and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained ...
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
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This vocalic w generally represented /uː/, [3] [4] as in wss ("use"). [5] However at that time the form w was still sometimes used to represent a digraph uu (see W), not as a separate letter. In modern Welsh, "W" is simply a single letter which often represents a vowel sound. Thus words borrowed from Welsh may use w this way, such as: