Ly is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, used in Hungarian.
Contents
| Hungarian language |
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 |
| Alphabet |
| Grammar |
| History |
| Other features |
| Hungarian and English |
Ly is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, used in Hungarian.
| Hungarian language |
|---|
| |
| Alphabet |
| Grammar |
| History |
| Other features |
| Hungarian and English |
Ly is the twentieth letter of the Hungarian alphabet. Its Hungarian name is elipszilon/ɛlːipsilon/. Now, it can represent the same phoneme /j/ (palatal approximant) as the Hungarian letter j, but historically, it represented the different phoneme /ʎ/ (palatal lateral approximant).
It is used this way only in Hungarian. In Hungarian, even if two characters are put together to make a different sound, they are considered one letter, and even acronyms keep the letter intact.
The combination lj (considered two separate letters, L and J) is also common in Hungarian and is even pronounced [ʎ] by many speakers. However, even it is sometimes subject to the same reduction to /j/ that ly has been, mainly if it is at the end of a word.
Originally, the digraph letter ly was used to represent the palatal lateral /ʎ/, just as the digraph letter ny is still used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/. However, in the eastern dialects as well as in the standard dialect, the phoneme /ʎ/ lost its lateral feature and merged with /j/ (akin to Spanish yeísmo ). The Hungarian letter ly came to be pronounced the same as the Hungarian letter j. In the western dialects, /ʎ/ lost its palatal feature and merged with /l/ (alveolar lateral approximant). In the northern dialects, the phoneme /ʎ/ has been preserved. [1]
The digraph ly was also used for the sound /ʎ/ in Croatian alphabet before Gaj's Latin Alphabet was introduced. [2]
These examples are Hungarian words that use the letter ly, with the English translation following:
H, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch, or regionally haitch.
A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English L, as in Larry. Lateral consonants contrast with central consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.
W, or w, is the twenty-third and fourth-to-last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. It represents a consonant, but in some languages it represents a vowel. Its name in English is double-u, plural double-ues.
Y, or y, is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth vowel letter of the English alphabet. In the English writing system, it mostly represents a vowel and seldom a consonant, and in other orthographies it may represent a vowel or a consonant. Its name in English is wye, plural wyes.
Ll/ll is a digraph that occurs in several languages.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes 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. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
A trigraph is a group of three characters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined.
The phonology of the Hungarian language is notable for its process of vowel harmony, the frequent occurrence of geminate consonants and the presence of otherwise uncommon palatal stops.
Lje is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
Yeísmo is a distinctive feature of certain dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (listen) and its merger into the phoneme (listen), usually realized as a palatal approximant or affricate. It is an example of delateralization.
Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Uzbek, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Ukrainian Latynka and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. Formerly ch was also considered a separate letter for collation purposes in Modern Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes in Polish; now the digraph ch in these languages continues to be used, but it is considered as a sequence of letters and sorted as such.
The Guarani alphabet (achegety) is used to write the Guarani language, spoken mostly in Paraguay and nearby countries. It consists of 33 letters.
Lj is a letter present in some Slavic languages, such as the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian and in romanised Macedonian, where it represents a palatal lateral approximant. For example, the word ljiljan is pronounced. Most languages containing the letter ⟨Lj⟩ in the alphabet are phonemic, which means that every symbol represents one sound, and is always pronounced the same way. In this case, joining the letters L and J creates a new letter or a sound. The digraph is treated as a single letter, and therefore it has its own place in the alphabet, takes up only one space in crossword puzzles and is written in line in vertical text. However, it is not found on standard computer keyboards. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol for the same sound: Љ.
Ny is a digraph in a number of languages such as Catalan, Ganda, Filipino/Tagalog, Hungarian, Swahili and Malay. In most of these languages, including all of the ones named above, it denotes the palatal nasal. To represent the palatal nasal in other languages, the letter nj is used, such as in Albanian and the countries using Gaj's Latin alphabet and the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia.
J, or j, is the tenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual name in English is jay, with a now-uncommon variant jy. When used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced palatal approximant, it may be called yod or jod.
Nh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of N and H. Together with lh and the interpunct, it is a typical feature of Occitan, a language illustrated by medieval troubadours. It commonly represents the voiced palatal nasal [ɲ], which is the same sound as the Spanish letter Ñ.
Ḷ is a letter of the Latin alphabet, derived from L with a diacritical dot below. It is or was used in some languages to represent various sounds.
Gh is a digraph found in many languages.
