List of Latin-script pentagraphs

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In the Latin script, pentagraphs are found primarily in Irish orthography. There is one archaic pentagraph in German orthography, which is found in the English words Nietzschean and derivatives (Nietzscheanism, Nietzscheanist, Nietzscheism, Nietzscheist).

Contents

Irish

Used between a velarized ("broad") and a palatalized ("slender") consonant:

abhai, obhai, odhai, and oghai are used to write /əu̯/ (/oː/ in Ulster)

amhai is used to write /əu̯/

adhai and aghai are used to write /əi̯/ (/eː/ in Ulster)

aidhe, aighe, oidhi, oidhe, oighi and oidhe are used to write /əi̯/

omhai is used to write /oː/

umhai is used to write /uː/

Used between a slender and a broad consonant:

eabha and eobha used to write /əu̯/ (/oː/ in Ulster)

eamha is used to write /əu̯/

eadha and eagha are used to write /əi̯/ (/eː/ in Ulster)

eomha is used to write /oː/

Used between two slender consonants:

eidhi and eighi are used to write /əi̯/:

Dutch

sjtsj is used as the transcription of the Cyrillic letter Щ, representing the consonant /ɕː/ in Russian, for example in the name Chroesjtsjov.

English

augha is used in the English names Gaughan and Vaughan to represent the sound /ɔː/.

French

chtch is used as the transcription of the Cyrillic letter Щ, representing the consonant /ɕː/ in Russian, for example in the name Khrouchtchev.

cques is pronounced as /k(ə)/ when the silent plural suffix -s is added to the tetragraph cque and in the proper name Jacques .

German

tzsch was once used in German to write the sound /tʃ/. It has largely been replaced by the tetragraph tsch, but is still found in proper names such as Tzschirner, Nietzsche, and Delitzsch.

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digraph (orthography)</span> Pair of characters used to write one phoneme

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tse (Cyrillic)</span> Cyrillic letter

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Russian orthography is an orthographic tradition formally considered to encompass spelling and punctuation. Russian spelling, which is mostly phonemic in practice, is a mix of morphological and phonetic principles, with a few etymological or historic forms, and occasional grammatical differentiation. The punctuation, originally based on Byzantine Greek, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reformulated on the models of French and German orthography.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ukrainian alphabet</span> Alphabet that uses letters from the Cyrillic script

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A tetragraph is a sequence of four letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds, that do not necessarily correspond to the individual values of the letters. In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch. English does not have tetragraphs in native words, but chth is a true tetragraph when found initially in words of Greek origin such as chthonian.

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A pentagraph is a sequence of five letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds, that do not correspond to the individual values of the letters. In German, for example, the pentagraph tzsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch, and indeed is found in the English word Nietzschean. Irish has several pentagraphs.

A hexagraph is a sequence of six letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds that do not correspond to the individual values of the letters. They occur in Irish orthography, and many of them can be analysed as a tetragraph followed by the vowels ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ on either side to indicate that the neighbouring consonants are palatalized ("slender"). However, not all Irish hexagraphs are analysable that way. The hexagraph ⟨oidhea⟩, for example, represents the same sound as the trigraph adh, and with the same effect on neighboring consonants.

A multigraph is a sequence of letters that behaves as a unit and is not the sum of its parts, such as English ⟨ch⟩ or French ⟨eau⟩. The term is infrequently used, as the number of letters is usually specified:

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