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Variably by dialect and even word, the / j / in this / j uː / may drop (rune / ˈ r uː n /, lute / ˈ l uː t /), causing a merger with / uː /; in other cases, the /j/ coalesces with the preceding consonant (issue / ˈ ɪ s. j uː / → / ˈ ɪ ʃ uː /), meaning that the silent e can affect the quality of a consonant much earlier in the ...
The silent e often additionally indicates that the vowel before c is a long vowel, as in rice, mace, and pacesetter. When adding suffixes with i e y (such as -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -ism, -ist, -y, and -ie) to root words ending in ce , the final e of the root word is often dropped and the root word retains the soft c pronunciation as in danced ...
Tense vowels are distinguished from lax vowels with a "silent" e that is added at the end of words. Thus, a in hat is lax /æ/, but when e is added in the word hate a is tense /eɪ/. Heavy and tense-r vowels follow a similar pattern, e.g. ar in car is heavy /ɑːr/, ar followed by silent e in care is /ɛər/.
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
Both forms of English keep the silent "e" in the words dyeing, singeing, and swingeing [89] (in the sense of dye, singe, and swinge), to distinguish them from dying, singing, swinging (in the sense of die, sing, and swing). In contrast, the verb bathe and the British verb bath both form bathing.
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The change affected words like gnat, gnostic, gnome, etc., the spelling with gn-being retained despite the loss of the /ɡ/ sound. The cluster is preserved in some Scots dialects. [23] The song The Gnu jokes about this silent g and other silent letters in English.