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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).
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/:
⟨sjtsj⟩ is used as the transcription of the Cyrillic letter Щ, representing the consonant /ɕː/ in Russian, for example in the name Chroesjtsjov.
⟨augha⟩ is used in the English names Gaughan and Vaughan to represent the sound /ɔː/.
⟨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 .
⟨tzsch⟩ was once used in German to write the sound /tʃ/ (ch as in cheese). It has largely been replaced by the tetragraph ⟨tsch⟩, but is still found in proper names such as Tzschirner, Nietzsche, and Delitzsch.
The Russian alphabet is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rusʹ since the 10th century to write what would become the modern Russian language.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the language's phonemes. 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 Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is used to write the Bulgarian language. The Cyrillic alphabet was originally developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 9th – 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School.
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.
The soft sign is a letter in the Cyrillic script that is used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short or reduced front vowel. However, over time, the specific vowel sound it denoted was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds.
Shcha, Shta, Scha, Šče or Sha with descender is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Russian, it represents the long voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative, similar to the pronunciation of ⟨sh⟩ in Welsh-sheep. In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents the consonant cluster, something like cash-chest. In Bulgarian, it represents the consonant cluster. Most other non-Slavic languages written in Cyrillic use this letter to spell the few loanwords that use it or foreign names; it is usually pronounced, an approximation of the Russian pronunciation of the letter, and is often omitted when teaching those languages.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, it became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
The letter Ъ ъ of the Cyrillic script is known as er goläm in the Bulgarian alphabet, as the hard sign in the modern Russian and Rusyn alphabets, as the debelo jer in pre-reform Serbian orthography, and as ayirish belgisi in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. The letter is called back yer or back jer and yor or jor in the pre-reform Russian orthography, in Old East Slavic, and in Old Church Slavonic.
Numerous Cyrillic alphabets are based on the Cyrillic script. The early Cyrillic alphabet was developed in the 9th century AD and replaced the earlier Glagolitic script developed by the theologians Cyril and Methodius. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 252 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia. Cyrillic is one of the most-used writing systems in the world. The creator is Saint Clement of Ohrid from the Preslav literary school in the First Bulgarian Empire.
The Cyrillic script family contains many specially treated two-letter combinations, or digraphs, but few of these are used in Slavic languages. In a few alphabets, trigraphs and even the occasional tetragraph or pentagraph are used.
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:
Yo, Jo or Io is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode, the letter ⟨Ё⟩ is named CYRILLIC CAPITAL/SMALL LETTER IO.
A heptagraph is a sequence of seven letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds, that do not correspond to the individual values of the letters.