Re: [Fontforge-devel] letter frequency tables

[Jason P. <zi...@gm...>]

On 21 Dec 2007 06:43:09 -0800, George Williams <gw...@si...> wrote:
> Hmm. One other question along these lines:
>
> English has lots of bigrams which sound nothing like the letters which
> make them up: ch, ph, sh, th, wh, qu, kn, gn, wr, gh
> and at least one trigram: sch
> (I'm not including things like "st", a consonantal combination which is
> common but where the distinct sounds of the letter are evident)
>
> I treat these as single phonemes. I presume these happen in other
> languages. "qu" is common throughout Romance languages. French also has
> "ch". Spanish (and Welsh) have "ll".
>
> Can anyone provide me with more combinations?
>

There are even tetragraphs in English such as the common "ough" and
"augh" that have different sounds depending on which word they're in,
and the virtually unpronounceable "phth" found most often in chemical
names derived from Greek, e.g., "naphtha". That's really a collision
of two digraphs but they happen often enough (in my opinion) to be
considered as a unit.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_%28orthography%29>

I could be mistaken, but you seem to be using the word "bigram" to
refer to digraphs. While this is not technically incorrect, "bigram"
has a broader definition.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigram>

-- 
-- 
Jason Pagura
zi...@gm...