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    What linguistic term do you use for the representation of one "sound" by two "letters" as in English "tea" (one vowel represented by E+A) or in English "shoe" (one consonant represented by S+H)?

    Question #100048. Asked by Flem-ish. (Oct 08 08 1:54 AM)


    looney_tunes

    		The ‘sh’ in shoe is a clear example of a digraph. “A digraph, bigraph, or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme (distinct sound) or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. The sound is often, but not necessarily, one which cannot be expressed using a single character in the orthography used by the language.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)

    The ‘ea’ in tea might be considered as a single sound which uses two vowels to show it. If so it is another digraph. If, however, you pronounce it so that one hears two vowels merged into one sound, it is a diphthong.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong


    Oct 08 08, 3:32 AM

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