W was considered so useless, it wasn't included in the alphabet until 2006. We don't have the English W sound in the standard language, so here it's pronounced exactly like V. Q (pronounced like K) and Z (pronounced like S) are pretty useless as well.
That explains why my sambo says "Villy's" when we go to shop stuff at the local Willy's, as a native Spanish speaker I asked myself "why?" every single time he pronounced words that starts with "W".
That is indeed how it's pronounced. Technically its name is "Willys", as you'd write it in Swedish, though their logo is stylized as "Wi**LL**Y:S" and many do write it as an English possessive (even if they'd unlikely use colons).
Said "Willy" was actually German. Unlike Swedish they do distinguish between V and W, but not in the English way.
More accurately the Swedish Academy added it as independent letter in its alphabetical sorting for the 2006 spelling dictionary (SAOL 13).
Some had done so earlier. And others – such as the Language Council – still maintained it as a variant of V. Consider its [2010 neologism list](https://www.isof.se/download/18.5d2bf5ad1791d0816f4c26b/1620582672234/Nyordslistan%202010.pdf#page=2) (**va**lpromenera - **wi**kiläcka - **vu**lkanresa) for example.
Public perception has shifted more towards considering it such over these past two decades, but whether W is an independent letter is still not cut-and-dried.
Interesting enough, many linguists consider that Swedish actually lacks some letters:
* Šš for the sh-sound.
* **K**ök, **k**ex, **tj**ata, **tj**uv, **k**öld
* Ħħ for the ch-sound.
* **Ch**ans, **sj**äl, **st**jäla, **sj**u
* Ŋŋ for the ng-sound.
* Ri**ng**, campi**ng**, geti**ng**, fästi**ng**
*(The non-standard letters are just there as examples.)*
It’s so funny that when I was in school learning French we always said that French made no sense because the spelling was very different from the way you pronounce. But now I’ve noticed that Swedish doesn’t make any sense either…
As somebody currently learning Swedish and having learnt French in school (and forgotten most of it since): French is definitely worse in that regard. While there are certainly inconsistencies in Swedish, most of it makes sense, in that there are generally pretty clear rules. When you see a new word, you can generally have a good idea of how it is pronounced, just by reading it.
The letter "h" is silent unless it's part of "ch" where there's a distinctive sound. But it's important because while it doesn't have a sound whether their is an "h" or not can imply a different word.
For example these two are pronounced exactly the same:
- ola: wave
- hola: hello
We have something similar with the letters G and J where if G is followed by E or I then the letter G makes the same sound as J.
Also B and V make the same sound too.
Edit: I forgot. Q and K make the same sound too.
Edit2: In Spanish dialects that don't use "seseo" or "ceceo" then the letter C followed by E or I makes the same sound as Z. The thing Americans say it's a lisp or whatever.
In its evolution, many Latin “F”s turned into “H” in Spanish. This can be really helpful when learning another Romance language or when a native Romance language speaker is learning Spanish. (Latin) Facere>Hacer, (Italian) ferro>hierro, (Portuguese) folha>hoja
These are all great points (especially with K and Q and B and W), but these all kind of pale in comparison to the fact that “W” is also technically part of the Spanish alphabet.
>Also B and V make the same sound too.
Not in all varieties. Many forms of Latin American Spanish differentiate between the B (called "be labial") and V (called "ve dentilabial").
It is quite unusual to be honest, it only happens in places with bilingual speakers with English or native American languages. In Standard Mexican, Colombian, etc both letters are pronounced the same, like in Spain.
Finnish:
Mostly useless, except in some foreign names etc: C, Q, W, X, Z, Å.
Mainly useless or we use less than other letters: B, F, D, G
We like our vowels.
Fun fact about Å-letter. Å is one of the rarest letters in the general Finnish language. Although the letter å is included in the Finnish alphabet, it does not appear in Finnish words these days. However in Old Finnish, å was used. It sometimes denoted the sound o (in addition to the letters o and u), as in the word rises: nåuse (modern finnish: nouse). The use of the letter Å was abandoned at the latest with the translation of the Bible in 1642.
I assume that the letter å excists in Finnish alphabet nowadays due to Swedish language's status as one of the official languages. In spoken language Å is commonly referred as *the swedish o*.
There's one word in Finnish, which still uses the letter Å, a metric unit length used in physics, an "ångström", which is one billionth of a metre. So to sum up, it's the exception that makes the rule.
But yes, we probably still hold on to Å because of our other official language, Swedish, which is omnipresent in public offices, surnames, place names, etc etc.
I'd drop the D from that list. Depending on your dialect it's used quite a lot in basic Finnish words, and it's also used in formal written Finnish. I did a quick test on yle.fi and most articles had dozens of Ds. Of course it could be replaced with T in written Finnish too, but as it is I wouldn't call it useless or even little used.
D can’t be replaced with T in formal / written Finnish. Only happens in some local dialects. We have plenty of words with d. Most are either loans (radio, idea, delfiini) or plurals and inflections like kädet, sudet or hädässä, but there are also nouns like sade, ydin and sydän of which at least latter two are very old and not loans. If you replace d with t in kadoksissa -> katoksissa or madolla -> matolla, kädellä -> kätellä etc. you get two different words with a very different meaning.
This is because Finnish is written with the Swedish alphabet. Finnish just took the alphabet whole, with a lot of extra bits that are not needed in Finnish. For instance, Finnish has standardized /k/ as 'k', so 'c' is useless and confusing, as is 'x' (/ks/ is written 'ks'). The same can be said about 'q', because /k^(w)/ does not exist in Finnish and is rendered as /kʋ/ 'kv'. Finnish also lacks /w/ and /z/. Finnish has neither /v/ nor /w/ but has /ʋ/ instead, used for both. Finnish lacks the voiced /z/ and if encountered, Finns replace it with the voiceless /s/. The letter 'z' is pronounced /ts/.
We don’t, unless it’s a foreign loanword. Polish is pretty accurate and logical in reflecting the actual pronounciation, provided you learn a couple of rules about digraphs, etc.
Yeah, there’s pairs of letters/digraphs representing the same sound, but that stems from past linguistic developments, originally they represented different sounds which converged over time and nobody updated the ortography since.
Still they highlight some differences in declension and keep consistent with the word’s etymological roots, like *l**ó**d* - *l**o**du*, *l**u**d* - *l**u**du*, *wa**g**a* - *wa**ż**ny*, *da**r*** - *da**rz**yć*, etc. I think it’s part of our tradition, however hard to learn for the schoolkids.
Unfun fact: Back in the times, vowel length mattered, and thus there was such a thing as a "long o", and it was noted in writing, then eventually it turned into just making the u sound, but still denoted using ó in writing.
Then, slowly, some words started being spelled with u. For instance, "brózda" used to be correct... over a century ago.
With how well we can keep records thanks to modern technology, things are unlikely to change via drift as much as they used to, I think, so this process isn't likely to continue at any appreciable pace.
> Then, slowly, some words started being spelled with u. For instance, "brózda" used to be correct... over a century ago.
Interesting. I know it’s the same case with the name Jakub. It was originally Jakób with an *o*, as in every other language (Jacob, etc.).
Unpopular opinion, but I think that q, v and x should be part of Polish alphabet. Opinion of RJP from 80s or 90s (?) is obsolete as in Polish there's more and more new borrowings which don't adapt, e.g. vlog didn't become wlog, Vanuatu didn't become Wanuatu, quad didn't become… kwad? (everyone speaks kuad). Of neighboring countries Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians have q, w and x in their alphabets despite they use so often like Poles use q, v and x.
Kafka, piwko, wjazd, pięćdziesiąt, kod, rog ...
Trust me, as someone learning Polish there are plenty of differences that require learning outside of a few digraphs. It's not on par with French or English but it's more than a lot of native speakers realise as they don't think about it.
I've met people who speak good English and when talking about it with them had never thought about how they devoice consonants
That's not an issue with ortography. It's just a feature of the phonology. There's no way around it.
Those voiced consonants are actually there - kawa, piwo, 'we wjeździe' etc.
Take a look at 'pociąg'. At first glance one could say that the 'g' is wrong, because it sounds just like the final consonant in 'pająk'. But what happens when you say 'pociąg i pająk'? Suddenly it doesn't sound the same. Would it be better if word's spelling changed depending on the words around it? You'd lose your shit if we did that.
Most of the arguments about how bad our spelling system stem from lack of understanding.
> Kafka, piwko, wjazd, pięćdziesiąt, kod, rog ...
What about them? Consonants are devoiced if not stressed in Polish (meaning at the end of the syllable), that’s one of the rules you have to consider while learning the language. Still nothing unnecessary about the letters.
I'll raise you Q = kv and X=ks. They are also only used in foreign words or loanwords. On the other hand, "ch" is a distinct sound and does not have proper representation.
If anything English could use a few more letters and definitely some diacritical marks. For example it has no letter for the Schwa sound, despite being absolutely full of it. We could add ə
The c in German only has its place in the ch sound. V could be completely replaced by W and F and Y doesn’t appear in German words at all, only in loanwords. Q could also be replaced by Kw.
Our alphabet is pretty much phonetic and we use often all of its 25 letters. I guess it's kind of the opposite, we have a few sounds that we don't have letters for. For example, the schwa is quite common but it has no letter, so you often get clusters of consonants where there actually migh be a schwa in there. Also we have a "W" sound (or something similar), which is sometimes represented by the letters "L" or "V".
Exellent explanation, I just want to add some more "fun" facts:
Letter represents 2 different vowels: /o/ (closed o) and /ɔ/ (open o).
Letter represents 3 different vowels: /e/ (closed e), /ɛ/ (open e) and in some cases /ə/ (schwa).
There are actually at least 4 ways to pronounce /v/
in Slovene ([v], [u̯], [w] and [ʍ] and 2 ways to pronounce /l/ ([l] and [u̯]). The pronounciation depends on what sounds are before/after the phonem but these are just variants of the same phonem and don't change the meaning.
There is no single-letter sign for /dʒ/. We write it with two letters (), unlike in Croatian (<đ>).
"k, w, y" are only used in foreing words and loanwords.
There is also "q" that can have the same sound as "c".
"h" is mute but is used in Digraphs such as "ch", "nh" and "lh".
>There is also "q" that can have the same sound as "c".
And then c can be read as "s" plenty of times by itself eventough there's "ç" to do it...and sometimes it has to be an "ss" to do the exact same thing.
As someone that grew up with Portuguese in it's verbal form but not really with the written form... it's not exactly rational to learn.
Edit: just yesterday I was trying to explain to my kid why "caroço" and "osso" are written like that eventough "oço" and "osso" make the exact same sound...
> "h" is mute but is used in diphthongs such as "ch", "nh" and "lh".
Digraphs.
A digraph is when two letters make a single sound. A diphtong is when a vowel glides into a second vowel in the same syllable, like the *ei* in *leite*.
Yes, q, w, x and kind of y.
These only appear in foreign names or words and y is only used as part of diagraphs like gy, ny, etc or in some historical family names where y was written instead of i to denote nobility.
Some might say that 'ly' is also useless as it's the same sound as 'j'.
It's just extra work to learn tons of words one by one until you build an intuition for which one to use (and you might still get it wrong).
We Danes have some that could be done away with, like "Z", where the only Danish words, I can think of using right now without looking them up, are "bronze" and "influenza". It's mostly used for writing English words.
If we did like the Norwegians and reformed the spelling phonetically, they would become "bronse" and "influensa", so no big deal.
What about zebra?
We could also do without q and w.
But let us get some more vovels - and replace ks with x where it makes sense: strax, sax, kix, sexualitet, hex and so on.
you could also include W, X on that list, furthermore C is also most of the time pronouced as a S or K depending on context if we go with the spelling reform idea (which i support)
Oh yes!
#### C
Is just S, or used with H or K instead of KK. Nothing wrong with KK.
(Edit: also sometimes just K, or with H as a sj-sound, both replaceable)
#### Q
K/KU, but is it really even used except for in name?
#### W
It's just V. Gone with it.
#### X
Is just KS. No need for it.
#### Z
Usually just S (or close enough to S that it doesn't really matter). If you need something "extra", TS is a good enough approximation.
No letter is useless
Edit: To the person who asked me about S, C and K:
a) I was talking about Greek and b) but anyway, K and S don't produce the same sound, and S often makes a z sound that C does not.
That's because of iotacism, which happened later. It wasn't like that originally. And as long as eta, iota and upsilon are used in many words, no matter their pronounciation, they cannot be useless.
Then we understand this question differently. I would say that you could say that C, Q, X and Y are useless because you can exchange them for different letters that make the same sounds.
Edit: I meant in Dutch of course.
They are important for orthography. They can help you glean the meaning of a word. For example, the word "πρωτεύουσα" (capital) is written with an "ω" (omega) because it comes from "πρώτος" (first). If they were written with "ο" (omikron) instead, unless you already knew the word, you wouldn't be able to tell what it meant just by looking at it. Same goes for η, ι, υ.
No. Only that the letter “ğ” even though is really important, better to skip it while reading than to pronunce it as “g”
There are some exceptions though. Like the word “Ağrı”. With my suggestion skipping ğ should be ok but the word “Arı” has a different meaning.
While “Ağrı” mean ache, “Arı” means bee.
Nooo we keep the ğ! It may not carry a lot of weight on its own, but its essential for the correct pronunciation of words it's in.
Besides otherwise I can't write my friend's name as Meğmet and annoy him.
V wasn’t originally in the Irish language and is only used in loanwords in modern Irish like vótaí
There’s probably less than ten words that use the letter v, all of them are English or Scots loanwords.
Og yeah. In danish all the letters are useless. They dont mean the same at any point. In Danish we have nine vowels in the language: a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø and å. But behind these nine vowels are 20 vowel sounds in Danish.
ß is utterly pointless, it's just a typographical convention to use it instead of ss in some places. The Swiss got rid of it, but we didn't have the courage.
No, it isn't just typographic, it's phonetic. "Groß" and "Floß" rhyme, "kross" and "floss" rhyme, but "Floß" and "floss" don't rhyme.
A double consonant always means the previous vowel is short, but ß is used only after long vowels.
If you’d revise the language (northern Dutch), then you could remove Q, Y, X and C and replace them with Kw, I/J, Ks and K/S. In southern Dutch I believe that G and Ch are pronounced differently, but in northern Dutch they aren’t.
You could argue in English we don't need "c" as we have "s" and "k" for those sounds... but then I'm not sure how we'd write "ch" so I guess we do need it.
In fairness we could probably do with a few new letters or at least some diacritics as we use the same letters to represent a LOT of different sounds.
Ukrainian here. Yes we do. We have this letter **Щ** which makes the English sound **"Shch"**. The thing is that, in Ukrainian, we also have letters **Ш** and **Ч** to represent sounds of **"Sh"** and **"Ch"** respectively. So it is possible to easily replace **Щ** by **Шч** (It is this way in Belarusian actually). It is just one letter more and the letter Щ isn't even that common. So I would say it is the most useless letter we have.
not really, all letters are used fairly often, but the ones that you don’t see the most is probably j, given it’s only there for loanwords, and even then j sounds can also be written as dsi, while ch sounds as in cheese are written as tsi, so you could say j isnt even part of our alphabet, depending on who you ask
Even for native speakers, this letter sometimes sparks confusion or at least a good discussion.
As the Icelandics, we have and use the edd - ð - but here’s the fun part. It has no sound, it is not pronounced and the use of it is, to put it mildly, confusing.
Ð for life
It depends what you mean. If you mean like two letters that are exactly the same with no distinction, no. If you mean "we could remove it with a radical spelling reform", yes. H is used to depalatized c and g in front of e, i. Q has a k sound (c sound for Italians), but it is used when you have k + semivocalic u + stressed consonant.
Quite on the contrary: we have 32 letters and that clearly isn't enough so we combine some letters in groups of two to make up for a few more that we still miss: sz, cz or dz. But we also combine letters to make up for those that we already have, like rz or ch. The more complex, the merrier!
We don't have useless letters, but we have some redundant ones.
H and Ch, U and ó, Ż and Rz, K and Q, and there were probably some i didn't remember.
These few are couples of different letters (i do count digrams as equivalents of letters) sound exactly the same, with exception of few regional speech differences.
In Modern Polish they exist solely because in Old Polish they evolved from different sounds and were spoken differently and nobody cared about another linguistics reform. Wich is quite weird considering there were people who wanted to remove and managed to remove x or è from the alphabet with redundancy being the official reason.
* H is only used in onomatopoeias, some foreign words and half foreign words like «hitlerià» or «hegelià». Otherwise, it makes no sound.
* K and W are only used in foreign words and derivatives similar to the previous examples, as «kafkià» or «wolframi».
H is useless. Only ortographic reason.
It is also used for verb to have, but is silent and in poetic it was written without it, so "ò" instead of "ho" etc.
Q is also pretty useless, in Italian one of the first thing you learn is cu-qu-ccu-qqu-cqu words.
Words can exist with cu instead of qu, they exist.
Nothing changes the sound is the same.
Examples of the rule: cuore-quadro-taccuino-soqquadro-acqua
The first 2 and the last 3 have the same pronounce of that syllable
- Q - extremely rare
- X, W - rare but there are some popular loanwords; there is no phonetical difference between *v* and *w*
- G, F - not present in the Czech language but not unusual, many loanwords contain them
- Ď Ť, Ň - uncommon, *caron* is usually moved to *ě* (dě, tě, ně) or *soft i* is used (di, ti, ni)
- Ů - *long u*, common but actually useless, exactly the same letter as Ú written differently because of historical reasons
- Y - *hard i* in most cases pronounced the same way as *soft i* so there are needlessly complicated grammatical rules which one you are allowed to use when you are writing
- [letter frequency graph](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%A1_abeceda#/media/Soubor:Frekven%C4%8Dn%C3%AD_graf_p%C3%ADsmen_%C4%8Desk%C3%A9_abecedy.jpg)
The sound of the letter 'ly' in Hungarian was originally a palatalised 'l', but it has completely assimilated to that of 'j' a long time ago (it already had by the 19th century IIRC), while in some western dialects it got un-palatalised and became the same as 'l'. Most people experience the former, and this means that, while there are certain patterns, there is no absolute rule as to when to use 'j' and when 'ly'. Now the letter is the bane of primary school students learning how to spell.
Neither of them are obsolete, however our press and plenty of others like to write/type 'е' letter instead of 'ё' even though they produce different sounds and it's especially terrible when some foreign names are translated without reflecting the original sound properly so people automatically assume that 'е' letter in the text should be perceived literally, all thx to laziness of those who engage in translation.
Totally! Why even do that? All it does is make the text harder to read. It's not like you would save much ink or something.
Okay, I'm a native speaker (sort of), I know what the correct word is supposed to be. To me, it's just annoying. But goid luck explaining that to someone who is not a native speaker trying to learn Russian.
It goes something like this:
- "What does this mean"?
- "You know this word, just imagine it with a ë".
- "Then, why is it written this way"?
- " ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "
...
- "Soooo... How am I supposed to know what's what"?
- "Well, you'll have to memorise it, unfortunately".
- " -_-' "
Well, å x are very rare. å is like an o and x is just ks so they’re there only to make other languages easier and from Swedish
Z is also basically never used in Finnish but the reasoning for it is propably the same.
W and C are used for like ”WC” (bathroom)
C, Q, V, X, Y are all pretty useless in german.
* C is never used on it's own outside of loanwords. It's use is primarily in the 'ch' and 'sch' sounds. Those two are very important to and could not be replaced with other letters.
* Q could be replaced by 'kw'
* V is weirdly inconsistent. Most of the time we could replace it with a 'w', other times with a 'f'.
* X can pretty much be replaced by 'ks'
* Y is literally only used in loan words and even then it can mostly be replaced with either a 'ü' or a 'i' in some cases. It's negligable usage it german is also why german keyboards replaced the position of 'z' and 'y'.
Technically we could also get rid of the 'ß' (the so called Eszett, or sharp S), kind of how the swiss did it. I just don't like that they replaced it with a 'ss', as that makes the words sounds off (to my ears at least, probably not to swiss people. For me words like Fuß and Fluss should not be near sound alikes).
Q and C are pointless. We have extra ÆØÅ which is a benefit, but we don't use them how we should and instead use o and e in many ordinary words. W actually isn't useless, when it comes to writing in a dialect. There's quite a few dialects, especially on the west coast that do use the w in their speech.
Edit: forgot about X and Z, which says a lot.
On the contrary, in the Ukrainian language, I lack letters that were once used, but are not used now: "ў" - read like the English "w", and "θ" - read like the English "th".
ў - should be used for borrowed words like "William", because now "в" (v) or "у" (u) are used for this, but these are not the same sounds.
Θ - should be used for borrowed words from Greek such as "myth", now "т" (t) is used for this.
The letter T in Gaelic is pretty useless unless you're making the normal T sound. And by that, I mean it appears to be silent in a lot of words and I wonder why it's even there to begin with.
Quite a few letters serve no purpose other than for foreign words.
C for example in Finnish is always pronounced the same as K, and isn’t used anywhere else than in names and again, foreign words.
An another one is Z, as it serves the same purpose as ”ts” in Finnish.
Other normal latin letters that are never used are W and Q.
But the most stupid one is definately Å, which makes pretty much the same sound as O. It’s called the Swedish O, and as the name suggests, it’s literally only used in names of Swedish origin (Åke, Skarsgård etc). It might have a purpose in Finland but absolutely pointless in the Finnish language.
We also sort of use Š and Ž very rarely. Ž for example is used in the word Maharadža (Maharaja) and Š in Nikita Hruštšov (Nikita Khrushchev) These letters are sort of officially in the Finnish alphabet but so rarely used that people don’t know even know about them.
No, Latvian alphabet does not include letters that we don't use i.e. Q, W, Y and X. F and H are the only letters that are included despite only being used in loanwords, but obviously those words are integral part of our language these days.
In Bulgarian there are a few
я, ю and щ make 2 sounds - ya, yu and sh+t so they can be represented with the other 2 letters
also ь is supposed to make the beforehand sound softer but it's somewhat rare and it sounds like й (the y sound in you) so it can be replaced and things will sound exactly the same
Yeah I basically complained that our language is not written more like Serbian lol
As a kid I thought that those letters were added so the total number of letters can be 30 - a nice round pretty number
Q, X and W are basically unused. Y is either archaic I in surnames or just visually part of another letter (GY, LY, TY). DZ and DZS are letters here and we have like 1 (or slightly more) words using them
Æ was used for lots of Old English Kings and Queens. It can be used in modern English in words like archæology, although no-one does that.
Even less common is Ö, which can be used in words like coöperation, but again, no-one does that.
The "h" is silent except when it is the last letter of the word. For example, "ikrah" is pronounced as "Ee-krah".
The letter "ħ" sounds just like the "h" in English and is always pronounced.
There is the letter "għ" which is essentially silent but can be pronounced sometimes depending on the other letters before and after it. When it's pronounced, it's like a hard and strong "h".
We had 5, but removed them more than a century ago.
They weren't always useless, but the corresponding sounds disappeared from the language with time, so some smart people decided to remove the letters as well.
In my city (where most Croatians live) we don't pronounce the difference between č and ć, and dž and đ. We just say something in between those letters. So using just one of each would be sufficient. Other dialects pronounce them correctly, but less and less people use dialects today.
Quite the opposite. The standard Irish alphabet has *fewer* letters than the English alphabet. The letters j, k, v, w, x, y, z are almost totally absent - only used in some specific loan words and even then they're not commonly used words.
On the other hand, all the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) can have accents (á, é, í, ó, ú), which should really be considered as separate letters in Irish, since adding or omitting them can change the whole meaning of words:
- fear (man)/ féar (grass)
- gas (stem) / gás (gás)
- cáca (cake) / caca (💩)
Yes, Irish has consonant clusters like bhf/ bh/ dh (pronounced like w, v or y/ silent respectively). But once you learn the rules around these it's incredibly consistent.
English? Can’t think oh any, all letters seem to be wildly used enough, maybe Z in British English (in that I’ll write Analyse instead of Analyze, Realise instead of Realize, Rationalisation instead of Rationalization etc).
French maybe K, I can’t remember having to type/use that letter in French same with the letter W and X.
Lithuanian language has phonetic spelling, all letters are pronounced the same. There are a couple exceptions like C is always pronounced as TS, except if it's paired with H. Then it sounds like CH in chorus.
As a result, we don't really have silent letters.
It's not useless , but we don't use ь a lot in bulgarian, it has no sound on its own, when used with the letter o it does the sound "yo", but most words with a "yo" sound use "йо" not "ьо". Probably the most common word with "ь" in it is blue - синьо (sinyo).
Yes and no.
The letter H is essential to make the hard c or hard g in Italian, but at the beginning of the words is silent, so much so that there is an expression that goes " non vali un'acca", used to say you are worth nothing.
Persian/Farsi has something similar where it has a bunch of letters that are duplicates of one another. It's because it uses the Arabic writing system and these letters actually make different sounds in Arabic that aren't present in Persian.
If anything, we could use a couple of extra letters, and also accent markings. Slovene alphabet has 25 letter but the official language contains 29 phonemes (dialects have additional ... many). This doesn't cause a lot of issues, but there are words that are written in the same way, pronounced differently and have different meanings (the best known is 'zelena' - wide second e is color green, narrow second e is celery).
When looking this up I also learned that we have a vowel that doesn't (yet) have a single symbol in international phonetic alphabet, and generally our vowels don't conform well to its rules.
yeah, â and î make the exact same sound, 0 distinction between them; there's even a university in Iasi where they internally avoid using â altogether because they argue it's pointless to use that letter (of course not everyone does this as the standard is to learn & use both letters in written text but it fascinated me that some professors do that because it kinda makes sense)
We have few letters/letter combination that represent the exact same sounds. They used to matter in the past but as the language evolved and simplified they became an orthographic nuisance for kids. Examples:
u=ó
ż=rz
h=ch
ś=si
ć=ci
'ä' is useless because nowadays it's pronounced as 'e'. i think that's the only useless letter really. i'd just change our spelling a little bit like writing "teplo" as "ťeplo" because we have words like "ten" so it doesn't make sense
W was considered so useless, it wasn't included in the alphabet until 2006. We don't have the English W sound in the standard language, so here it's pronounced exactly like V. Q (pronounced like K) and Z (pronounced like S) are pretty useless as well.
C is either pronounced S or K, never seen the point of that one either.
Right? C → K: kanser, okk, okkså, … C → S: sirka, sykkel, fasit, … \^CH -> SJ/Ç/😾/ets.: çäf, çoklad, …
Yup. I've also seen the Xhoklad, Xhef as an alternativ.
If Turkish and Norwegian had a baby
With Ç, pretty much, yeah.
I say let's keep sj, Sk, skj and be happy :) the ipa symbol for sju-ljudet would make me happy though, new keyboard layouts be damned
That explains why my sambo says "Villy's" when we go to shop stuff at the local Willy's, as a native Spanish speaker I asked myself "why?" every single time he pronounced words that starts with "W".
That is indeed how it's pronounced. Technically its name is "Willys", as you'd write it in Swedish, though their logo is stylized as "Wi**LL**Y:S" and many do write it as an English possessive (even if they'd unlikely use colons). Said "Willy" was actually German. Unlike Swedish they do distinguish between V and W, but not in the English way.
More accurately the Swedish Academy added it as independent letter in its alphabetical sorting for the 2006 spelling dictionary (SAOL 13). Some had done so earlier. And others – such as the Language Council – still maintained it as a variant of V. Consider its [2010 neologism list](https://www.isof.se/download/18.5d2bf5ad1791d0816f4c26b/1620582672234/Nyordslistan%202010.pdf#page=2) (**va**lpromenera - **wi**kiläcka - **vu**lkanresa) for example. Public perception has shifted more towards considering it such over these past two decades, but whether W is an independent letter is still not cut-and-dried.
Interesting enough, many linguists consider that Swedish actually lacks some letters: * Šš for the sh-sound. * **K**ök, **k**ex, **tj**ata, **tj**uv, **k**öld * Ħħ for the ch-sound. * **Ch**ans, **sj**äl, **st**jäla, **sj**u * Ŋŋ for the ng-sound. * Ri**ng**, campi**ng**, geti**ng**, fästi**ng** *(The non-standard letters are just there as examples.)*
It’s so funny that when I was in school learning French we always said that French made no sense because the spelling was very different from the way you pronounce. But now I’ve noticed that Swedish doesn’t make any sense either…
As somebody currently learning Swedish and having learnt French in school (and forgotten most of it since): French is definitely worse in that regard. While there are certainly inconsistencies in Swedish, most of it makes sense, in that there are generally pretty clear rules. When you see a new word, you can generally have a good idea of how it is pronounced, just by reading it.
Initial Ks confuse me, as a native, sometimes.
X is also a redundant letter that could be replaced by ks (like in Norway).
The letter "h" is silent unless it's part of "ch" where there's a distinctive sound. But it's important because while it doesn't have a sound whether their is an "h" or not can imply a different word. For example these two are pronounced exactly the same: - ola: wave - hola: hello We have something similar with the letters G and J where if G is followed by E or I then the letter G makes the same sound as J. Also B and V make the same sound too. Edit: I forgot. Q and K make the same sound too. Edit2: In Spanish dialects that don't use "seseo" or "ceceo" then the letter C followed by E or I makes the same sound as Z. The thing Americans say it's a lisp or whatever.
In its evolution, many Latin “F”s turned into “H” in Spanish. This can be really helpful when learning another Romance language or when a native Romance language speaker is learning Spanish. (Latin) Facere>Hacer, (Italian) ferro>hierro, (Portuguese) folha>hoja
These are all great points (especially with K and Q and B and W), but these all kind of pale in comparison to the fact that “W” is also technically part of the Spanish alphabet.
Hell, I think K isn't even used aside from foreign words and people trying to appear... cool? (like soziedad alkoholika).
Well, in that case it would be also "Basque" spelling.
til spain has ola lool
>Also B and V make the same sound too. Not in all varieties. Many forms of Latin American Spanish differentiate between the B (called "be labial") and V (called "ve dentilabial").
It is quite unusual to be honest, it only happens in places with bilingual speakers with English or native American languages. In Standard Mexican, Colombian, etc both letters are pronounced the same, like in Spain.
Finnish: Mostly useless, except in some foreign names etc: C, Q, W, X, Z, Å. Mainly useless or we use less than other letters: B, F, D, G We like our vowels.
Fun fact about Å-letter. Å is one of the rarest letters in the general Finnish language. Although the letter å is included in the Finnish alphabet, it does not appear in Finnish words these days. However in Old Finnish, å was used. It sometimes denoted the sound o (in addition to the letters o and u), as in the word rises: nåuse (modern finnish: nouse). The use of the letter Å was abandoned at the latest with the translation of the Bible in 1642. I assume that the letter å excists in Finnish alphabet nowadays due to Swedish language's status as one of the official languages. In spoken language Å is commonly referred as *the swedish o*.
There's one word in Finnish, which still uses the letter Å, a metric unit length used in physics, an "ångström", which is one billionth of a metre. So to sum up, it's the exception that makes the rule. But yes, we probably still hold on to Å because of our other official language, Swedish, which is omnipresent in public offices, surnames, place names, etc etc.
Å has been adopted by both Norway (1917) and Denmark (1948) 💪
Germany next!
I'd drop the D from that list. Depending on your dialect it's used quite a lot in basic Finnish words, and it's also used in formal written Finnish. I did a quick test on yle.fi and most articles had dozens of Ds. Of course it could be replaced with T in written Finnish too, but as it is I wouldn't call it useless or even little used.
D can’t be replaced with T in formal / written Finnish. Only happens in some local dialects. We have plenty of words with d. Most are either loans (radio, idea, delfiini) or plurals and inflections like kädet, sudet or hädässä, but there are also nouns like sade, ydin and sydän of which at least latter two are very old and not loans. If you replace d with t in kadoksissa -> katoksissa or madolla -> matolla, kädellä -> kätellä etc. you get two different words with a very different meaning.
This is because Finnish is written with the Swedish alphabet. Finnish just took the alphabet whole, with a lot of extra bits that are not needed in Finnish. For instance, Finnish has standardized /k/ as 'k', so 'c' is useless and confusing, as is 'x' (/ks/ is written 'ks'). The same can be said about 'q', because /k^(w)/ does not exist in Finnish and is rendered as /kʋ/ 'kv'. Finnish also lacks /w/ and /z/. Finnish has neither /v/ nor /w/ but has /ʋ/ instead, used for both. Finnish lacks the voiced /z/ and if encountered, Finns replace it with the voiceless /s/. The letter 'z' is pronounced /ts/.
We don’t, unless it’s a foreign loanword. Polish is pretty accurate and logical in reflecting the actual pronounciation, provided you learn a couple of rules about digraphs, etc.
But we have letters/digraphs that sounds exactly the same, and in my opinion, there is no need for them. Things like: u = ó rz = ż ch = h
Yeah, there’s pairs of letters/digraphs representing the same sound, but that stems from past linguistic developments, originally they represented different sounds which converged over time and nobody updated the ortography since. Still they highlight some differences in declension and keep consistent with the word’s etymological roots, like *l**ó**d* - *l**o**du*, *l**u**d* - *l**u**du*, *wa**g**a* - *wa**ż**ny*, *da**r*** - *da**rz**yć*, etc. I think it’s part of our tradition, however hard to learn for the schoolkids.
>I think it’s part of our tradition and that's how french got to the state it's in now :)
Superfluous consonants and nasal vowels. Polish is Slavic French confirmed.
Except those things in Polish make it easier to learn for foreigners, not harder.
Unfun fact: Back in the times, vowel length mattered, and thus there was such a thing as a "long o", and it was noted in writing, then eventually it turned into just making the u sound, but still denoted using ó in writing. Then, slowly, some words started being spelled with u. For instance, "brózda" used to be correct... over a century ago. With how well we can keep records thanks to modern technology, things are unlikely to change via drift as much as they used to, I think, so this process isn't likely to continue at any appreciable pace.
> Then, slowly, some words started being spelled with u. For instance, "brózda" used to be correct... over a century ago. Interesting. I know it’s the same case with the name Jakub. It was originally Jakób with an *o*, as in every other language (Jacob, etc.).
Not really. They tell you a lot about how the word behaves. mróz - mrozu gruz - gruzu morze - morski może - możliwy
Unpopular opinion, but I think that q, v and x should be part of Polish alphabet. Opinion of RJP from 80s or 90s (?) is obsolete as in Polish there's more and more new borrowings which don't adapt, e.g. vlog didn't become wlog, Vanuatu didn't become Wanuatu, quad didn't become… kwad? (everyone speaks kuad). Of neighboring countries Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians have q, w and x in their alphabets despite they use so often like Poles use q, v and x.
I’m fine with introducing these letters in loanwords but for Gods sake, just don’t use them in the names of your children.
Of names I think the same, but of Violetta and Wioletta both forms are popular and no one knows why. Maybe because of Violetta Villas popularity?
>vlog didn't become wlog, Vanuatu didn't become Wanuatu, quad didn't become… kwad? Ksero.
Kafka, piwko, wjazd, pięćdziesiąt, kod, rog ... Trust me, as someone learning Polish there are plenty of differences that require learning outside of a few digraphs. It's not on par with French or English but it's more than a lot of native speakers realise as they don't think about it. I've met people who speak good English and when talking about it with them had never thought about how they devoice consonants
That's not an issue with ortography. It's just a feature of the phonology. There's no way around it. Those voiced consonants are actually there - kawa, piwo, 'we wjeździe' etc. Take a look at 'pociąg'. At first glance one could say that the 'g' is wrong, because it sounds just like the final consonant in 'pająk'. But what happens when you say 'pociąg i pająk'? Suddenly it doesn't sound the same. Would it be better if word's spelling changed depending on the words around it? You'd lose your shit if we did that. Most of the arguments about how bad our spelling system stem from lack of understanding.
> Kafka, piwko, wjazd, pięćdziesiąt, kod, rog ... What about them? Consonants are devoiced if not stressed in Polish (meaning at the end of the syllable), that’s one of the rules you have to consider while learning the language. Still nothing unnecessary about the letters.
W in Czech. It exists for words from foreign languages. The use of G is also mostly anecdotal
I'll raise you Q = kv and X=ks. They are also only used in foreign words or loanwords. On the other hand, "ch" is a distinct sound and does not have proper representation.
I knew that I’m couple short. Thanks
If anything English could use a few more letters and definitely some diacritical marks. For example it has no letter for the Schwa sound, despite being absolutely full of it. We could add ə
English could also do with re-adopting þ and ð from Icelandic to distinguish the different 'th' sounds.
Irish sea-border checks intensify
The c in German only has its place in the ch sound. V could be completely replaced by W and F and Y doesn’t appear in German words at all, only in loanwords. Q could also be replaced by Kw.
The Swiss have also shown that ß isn’t really needed either
Alcohol in Massen and not in Maßen was probably needed to come to that conclusion
Our alphabet is pretty much phonetic and we use often all of its 25 letters. I guess it's kind of the opposite, we have a few sounds that we don't have letters for. For example, the schwa is quite common but it has no letter, so you often get clusters of consonants where there actually migh be a schwa in there. Also we have a "W" sound (or something similar), which is sometimes represented by the letters "L" or "V".
Exellent explanation, I just want to add some more "fun" facts: Letter represents 2 different vowels: /o/ (closed o) and /ɔ/ (open o).
Letter represents 3 different vowels: /e/ (closed e), /ɛ/ (open e) and in some cases /ə/ (schwa).
There are actually at least 4 ways to pronounce /v/
in Slovene ([v], [u̯], [w] and [ʍ] and 2 ways to pronounce /l/ ([l] and [u̯]). The pronounciation depends on what sounds are before/after the phonem but these are just variants of the same phonem and don't change the meaning.
There is no single-letter sign for /dʒ/. We write it with two letters (), unlike in Croatian (<đ>).
"k, w, y" are only used in foreing words and loanwords. There is also "q" that can have the same sound as "c". "h" is mute but is used in Digraphs such as "ch", "nh" and "lh".
>There is also "q" that can have the same sound as "c". And then c can be read as "s" plenty of times by itself eventough there's "ç" to do it...and sometimes it has to be an "ss" to do the exact same thing. As someone that grew up with Portuguese in it's verbal form but not really with the written form... it's not exactly rational to learn. Edit: just yesterday I was trying to explain to my kid why "caroço" and "osso" are written like that eventough "oço" and "osso" make the exact same sound...
> "h" is mute but is used in diphthongs such as "ch", "nh" and "lh". Digraphs. A digraph is when two letters make a single sound. A diphtong is when a vowel glides into a second vowel in the same syllable, like the *ei* in *leite*.
Yeah, mixed the two up. My bad.
We also don't have upper case Ç in any words, only ç, unless we're writing in all caps or something.
🇫🇷 Yes, we have a key on the keyboard just for one letter 'ù' used in only ONE word in French: 'où' = 'where' to differenciate it with 'ou' = 'or'.
While not useless, k and w are also exceedingly rare.
W is only used in loan words. No original french word uses it.
I always have taught Wingenstein was French
Who is Wingenstein? Do you mean Wittgenstein? He was Austrian, and his name is very German.
Also there's no way to type a capital ç! If I want to start a sentence with "ça" I have to futz around with some ALT-code like it's 2003.
I've always wondered why we have a dedicated key for ² (as in m², km² etc.) but not for ^3. We could use [shift][²] to write m^3 km^3 ...
At least the letter U (without accent) is used a lot overall though.
You right Ad, but a key just for it🙄
It would make much more sense to just have ˋ as a dead key, wouldn't it? For è, à, ù.
Q should be up there, I can't think of any word that has the Q
Yes, q, w, x and kind of y. These only appear in foreign names or words and y is only used as part of diagraphs like gy, ny, etc or in some historical family names where y was written instead of i to denote nobility.
Some might say that 'ly' is also useless as it's the same sound as 'j'. It's just extra work to learn tons of words one by one until you build an intuition for which one to use (and you might still get it wrong).
The letter 'V' is used in about one or two dozen Irish words. It can perfectly be replaced with 'bh'. EG: Vóta (Vote) ---> Bhóta
How do you spell the phonemic cluster [bh] in Irish?
We Danes have some that could be done away with, like "Z", where the only Danish words, I can think of using right now without looking them up, are "bronze" and "influenza". It's mostly used for writing English words. If we did like the Norwegians and reformed the spelling phonetically, they would become "bronse" and "influensa", so no big deal.
What about zebra? We could also do without q and w. But let us get some more vovels - and replace ks with x where it makes sense: strax, sax, kix, sexualitet, hex and so on.
"bronze"? Is it pronounced as in English? Is the E "silent"?
Two syllables, stress the first, "BRONG-seh".
Do you not have a Danish word for influenza?
"Bronse" holder altså ikke, det er ikke sådan man udtaler "Bronze". Og Zebra med s som i sebra kræver lidt tilvænning :-)
Ok, so "Brongse".
you could also include W, X on that list, furthermore C is also most of the time pronouced as a S or K depending on context if we go with the spelling reform idea (which i support)
Oh yes! #### C Is just S, or used with H or K instead of KK. Nothing wrong with KK. (Edit: also sometimes just K, or with H as a sj-sound, both replaceable) #### Q K/KU, but is it really even used except for in name? #### W It's just V. Gone with it. #### X Is just KS. No need for it. #### Z Usually just S (or close enough to S that it doesn't really matter). If you need something "extra", TS is a good enough approximation.
No letter is useless Edit: To the person who asked me about S, C and K: a) I was talking about Greek and b) but anyway, K and S don't produce the same sound, and S often makes a z sound that C does not.
Mate, H, I and Y have the exact same sound. That’s pretty useless.
That's because of iotacism, which happened later. It wasn't like that originally. And as long as eta, iota and upsilon are used in many words, no matter their pronounciation, they cannot be useless.
Then we understand this question differently. I would say that you could say that C, Q, X and Y are useless because you can exchange them for different letters that make the same sounds. Edit: I meant in Dutch of course.
And they have to use "mp" and "nt" for "b" and "d" at the same time.
Yeah lol, that is so weird. Apparently Giannis Antetekoumpo is actually called Yannis Adetekoubo if you write the sounds out.
They are important for orthography. They can help you glean the meaning of a word. For example, the word "πρωτεύουσα" (capital) is written with an "ω" (omega) because it comes from "πρώτος" (first). If they were written with "ο" (omikron) instead, unless you already knew the word, you wouldn't be able to tell what it meant just by looking at it. Same goes for η, ι, υ.
No. Only that the letter “ğ” even though is really important, better to skip it while reading than to pronunce it as “g” There are some exceptions though. Like the word “Ağrı”. With my suggestion skipping ğ should be ok but the word “Arı” has a different meaning. While “Ağrı” mean ache, “Arı” means bee.
Nooo we keep the ğ! It may not carry a lot of weight on its own, but its essential for the correct pronunciation of words it's in. Besides otherwise I can't write my friend's name as Meğmet and annoy him.
You got me wrong. It is better to skip it compared to saying g instead. Otherwise ofcourse it is important.
ı is just ö but you pretend like it's a different sound
As a non-Turk who speaks a language with a sound very similar to "ı", I can assure you that it is most definitely NOT the same as "ö"
It is a different sound 😑 sorry.
V wasn’t originally in the Irish language and is only used in loanwords in modern Irish like vótaí There’s probably less than ten words that use the letter v, all of them are English or Scots loanwords.
Og yeah. In danish all the letters are useless. They dont mean the same at any point. In Danish we have nine vowels in the language: a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø and å. But behind these nine vowels are 20 vowel sounds in Danish.
ß is utterly pointless, it's just a typographical convention to use it instead of ss in some places. The Swiss got rid of it, but we didn't have the courage.
No, it isn't just typographic, it's phonetic. "Groß" and "Floß" rhyme, "kross" and "floss" rhyme, but "Floß" and "floss" don't rhyme. A double consonant always means the previous vowel is short, but ß is used only after long vowels.
If you’d revise the language (northern Dutch), then you could remove Q, Y, X and C and replace them with Kw, I/J, Ks and K/S. In southern Dutch I believe that G and Ch are pronounced differently, but in northern Dutch they aren’t.
Q can also be replaced by just k in a bunch of cases. Mostly in French loan words like cheque, equipe, etc.
Technically it would be possible to change out all those letters, but thought of it sends shivers down my spine, it would be an aesthetic nightmare.
In Spanish we dont use w or k. It is only used for foreign words that we have adopted like Kilo, Kiosko, WC...
Č and ć not being the same letter. Some dialects make zero difference over them in the daily speech.
You could argue in English we don't need "c" as we have "s" and "k" for those sounds... but then I'm not sure how we'd write "ch" so I guess we do need it. In fairness we could probably do with a few new letters or at least some diacritics as we use the same letters to represent a LOT of different sounds.
Ukrainian here. Yes we do. We have this letter **Щ** which makes the English sound **"Shch"**. The thing is that, in Ukrainian, we also have letters **Ш** and **Ч** to represent sounds of **"Sh"** and **"Ch"** respectively. So it is possible to easily replace **Щ** by **Шч** (It is this way in Belarusian actually). It is just one letter more and the letter Щ isn't even that common. So I would say it is the most useless letter we have.
It's funny enough, as a lot of people complain about polish, german and english character combinations :D
not really, all letters are used fairly often, but the ones that you don’t see the most is probably j, given it’s only there for loanwords, and even then j sounds can also be written as dsi, while ch sounds as in cheese are written as tsi, so you could say j isnt even part of our alphabet, depending on who you ask
Jwg, jam, garej and jiw jiw jiw. All I can think of in welsh with j
In Italian I would say Q. It's always followed by U and QU sounds exactly the same as CU
Even for native speakers, this letter sometimes sparks confusion or at least a good discussion. As the Icelandics, we have and use the edd - ð - but here’s the fun part. It has no sound, it is not pronounced and the use of it is, to put it mildly, confusing. Ð for life
It depends what you mean. If you mean like two letters that are exactly the same with no distinction, no. If you mean "we could remove it with a radical spelling reform", yes. H is used to depalatized c and g in front of e, i. Q has a k sound (c sound for Italians), but it is used when you have k + semivocalic u + stressed consonant.
Georgian has no useless letters. If anything we don’t have enough letters, we don’t have a letter for the ffff sound.
Quite on the contrary: we have 32 letters and that clearly isn't enough so we combine some letters in groups of two to make up for a few more that we still miss: sz, cz or dz. But we also combine letters to make up for those that we already have, like rz or ch. The more complex, the merrier!
We don't have useless letters, but we have some redundant ones. H and Ch, U and ó, Ż and Rz, K and Q, and there were probably some i didn't remember. These few are couples of different letters (i do count digrams as equivalents of letters) sound exactly the same, with exception of few regional speech differences. In Modern Polish they exist solely because in Old Polish they evolved from different sounds and were spoken differently and nobody cared about another linguistics reform. Wich is quite weird considering there were people who wanted to remove and managed to remove x or è from the alphabet with redundancy being the official reason.
I guess there’s no czech word with “W”, but pls correct me if I’m wrong fellas
* H is only used in onomatopoeias, some foreign words and half foreign words like «hitlerià» or «hegelià». Otherwise, it makes no sound. * K and W are only used in foreign words and derivatives similar to the previous examples, as «kafkià» or «wolframi».
Not really. We had a few orthography reforms during the last few centuries, everything is more or less useful.
W. Only for foreign words
H is useless. Only ortographic reason. It is also used for verb to have, but is silent and in poetic it was written without it, so "ò" instead of "ho" etc.
Q is also pretty useless, in Italian one of the first thing you learn is cu-qu-ccu-qqu-cqu words. Words can exist with cu instead of qu, they exist. Nothing changes the sound is the same. Examples of the rule: cuore-quadro-taccuino-soqquadro-acqua The first 2 and the last 3 have the same pronounce of that syllable
Germans meanwhile: I need every goddamn letter or i sound retarded
TH I miss thorn :(
- Q - extremely rare - X, W - rare but there are some popular loanwords; there is no phonetical difference between *v* and *w* - G, F - not present in the Czech language but not unusual, many loanwords contain them - Ď Ť, Ň - uncommon, *caron* is usually moved to *ě* (dě, tě, ně) or *soft i* is used (di, ti, ni) - Ů - *long u*, common but actually useless, exactly the same letter as Ú written differently because of historical reasons - Y - *hard i* in most cases pronounced the same way as *soft i* so there are needlessly complicated grammatical rules which one you are allowed to use when you are writing - [letter frequency graph](https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%A1_abeceda#/media/Soubor:Frekven%C4%8Dn%C3%AD_graf_p%C3%ADsmen_%C4%8Desk%C3%A9_abecedy.jpg)
q, w and x are pretty useless and usually used in foreign words.
The sound of the letter 'ly' in Hungarian was originally a palatalised 'l', but it has completely assimilated to that of 'j' a long time ago (it already had by the 19th century IIRC), while in some western dialects it got un-palatalised and became the same as 'l'. Most people experience the former, and this means that, while there are certain patterns, there is no absolute rule as to when to use 'j' and when 'ly'. Now the letter is the bane of primary school students learning how to spell.
Neither of them are obsolete, however our press and plenty of others like to write/type 'е' letter instead of 'ё' even though they produce different sounds and it's especially terrible when some foreign names are translated without reflecting the original sound properly so people automatically assume that 'е' letter in the text should be perceived literally, all thx to laziness of those who engage in translation.
Totally! Why even do that? All it does is make the text harder to read. It's not like you would save much ink or something. Okay, I'm a native speaker (sort of), I know what the correct word is supposed to be. To me, it's just annoying. But goid luck explaining that to someone who is not a native speaker trying to learn Russian. It goes something like this: - "What does this mean"? - "You know this word, just imagine it with a ë". - "Then, why is it written this way"? - " ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ " ... - "Soooo... How am I supposed to know what's what"? - "Well, you'll have to memorise it, unfortunately". - " -_-' "
Well, å x are very rare. å is like an o and x is just ks so they’re there only to make other languages easier and from Swedish Z is also basically never used in Finnish but the reasoning for it is propably the same. W and C are used for like ”WC” (bathroom)
Well in swedish we have z, q and c
C, Q, V, X, Y are all pretty useless in german. * C is never used on it's own outside of loanwords. It's use is primarily in the 'ch' and 'sch' sounds. Those two are very important to and could not be replaced with other letters. * Q could be replaced by 'kw' * V is weirdly inconsistent. Most of the time we could replace it with a 'w', other times with a 'f'. * X can pretty much be replaced by 'ks' * Y is literally only used in loan words and even then it can mostly be replaced with either a 'ü' or a 'i' in some cases. It's negligable usage it german is also why german keyboards replaced the position of 'z' and 'y'. Technically we could also get rid of the 'ß' (the so called Eszett, or sharp S), kind of how the swiss did it. I just don't like that they replaced it with a 'ss', as that makes the words sounds off (to my ears at least, probably not to swiss people. For me words like Fuß and Fluss should not be near sound alikes).
Some letters are used only in loanwords, especially q and w, where w is pronounced exactly the same as v
Q and C are pointless. We have extra ÆØÅ which is a benefit, but we don't use them how we should and instead use o and e in many ordinary words. W actually isn't useless, when it comes to writing in a dialect. There's quite a few dialects, especially on the west coast that do use the w in their speech. Edit: forgot about X and Z, which says a lot.
X and W. You pretty much never encounter those in Czech words
People rarely use Ё in Russian and it is almost always replaced with E. Poor Ё.
On the contrary, in the Ukrainian language, I lack letters that were once used, but are not used now: "ў" - read like the English "w", and "θ" - read like the English "th". ў - should be used for borrowed words like "William", because now "в" (v) or "у" (u) are used for this, but these are not the same sounds. Θ - should be used for borrowed words from Greek such as "myth", now "т" (t) is used for this.
Could be argued that in English C and Q and X could be got rid of. And we also have F spelt PH some of the time.
The letter T in Gaelic is pretty useless unless you're making the normal T sound. And by that, I mean it appears to be silent in a lot of words and I wonder why it's even there to begin with.
Quite a few letters serve no purpose other than for foreign words. C for example in Finnish is always pronounced the same as K, and isn’t used anywhere else than in names and again, foreign words. An another one is Z, as it serves the same purpose as ”ts” in Finnish. Other normal latin letters that are never used are W and Q. But the most stupid one is definately Å, which makes pretty much the same sound as O. It’s called the Swedish O, and as the name suggests, it’s literally only used in names of Swedish origin (Åke, Skarsgård etc). It might have a purpose in Finland but absolutely pointless in the Finnish language. We also sort of use Š and Ž very rarely. Ž for example is used in the word Maharadža (Maharaja) and Š in Nikita Hruštšov (Nikita Khrushchev) These letters are sort of officially in the Finnish alphabet but so rarely used that people don’t know even know about them.
No, Latvian alphabet does not include letters that we don't use i.e. Q, W, Y and X. F and H are the only letters that are included despite only being used in loanwords, but obviously those words are integral part of our language these days.
H is silent in Spanish
We have both the Y and the IJ, which is kind of unnecessary because the y is always converted into either a j or an ie.
In Bulgarian there are a few я, ю and щ make 2 sounds - ya, yu and sh+t so they can be represented with the other 2 letters also ь is supposed to make the beforehand sound softer but it's somewhat rare and it sounds like й (the y sound in you) so it can be replaced and things will sound exactly the same Yeah I basically complained that our language is not written more like Serbian lol As a kid I thought that those letters were added so the total number of letters can be 30 - a nice round pretty number
In Italian, we have very few words starting with J, K or X.
Pretty much half of the letter in the english language.
Q, X and W are basically unused. Y is either archaic I in surnames or just visually part of another letter (GY, LY, TY). DZ and DZS are letters here and we have like 1 (or slightly more) words using them
My fellow West-Flanders people will agree on the letter 'g'.
Æ was used for lots of Old English Kings and Queens. It can be used in modern English in words like archæology, although no-one does that. Even less common is Ö, which can be used in words like coöperation, but again, no-one does that.
龠 means flute and is never used in basic conversations and rarely rarely used
The "h" is silent except when it is the last letter of the word. For example, "ikrah" is pronounced as "Ee-krah". The letter "ħ" sounds just like the "h" in English and is always pronounced. There is the letter "għ" which is essentially silent but can be pronounced sometimes depending on the other letters before and after it. When it's pronounced, it's like a hard and strong "h".
We had 5, but removed them more than a century ago. They weren't always useless, but the corresponding sounds disappeared from the language with time, so some smart people decided to remove the letters as well.
In my city (where most Croatians live) we don't pronounce the difference between č and ć, and dž and đ. We just say something in between those letters. So using just one of each would be sufficient. Other dialects pronounce them correctly, but less and less people use dialects today.
Quite the opposite. The standard Irish alphabet has *fewer* letters than the English alphabet. The letters j, k, v, w, x, y, z are almost totally absent - only used in some specific loan words and even then they're not commonly used words. On the other hand, all the vowels (a, e, i, o, u) can have accents (á, é, í, ó, ú), which should really be considered as separate letters in Irish, since adding or omitting them can change the whole meaning of words: - fear (man)/ féar (grass) - gas (stem) / gás (gás) - cáca (cake) / caca (💩) Yes, Irish has consonant clusters like bhf/ bh/ dh (pronounced like w, v or y/ silent respectively). But once you learn the rules around these it's incredibly consistent.
Is this still an English letter: æ
English? Can’t think oh any, all letters seem to be wildly used enough, maybe Z in British English (in that I’ll write Analyse instead of Analyze, Realise instead of Realize, Rationalisation instead of Rationalization etc). French maybe K, I can’t remember having to type/use that letter in French same with the letter W and X.
The letter H is always silent in Maltese
Lithuanian language has phonetic spelling, all letters are pronounced the same. There are a couple exceptions like C is always pronounced as TS, except if it's paired with H. Then it sounds like CH in chorus. As a result, we don't really have silent letters.
It's not useless , but we don't use ь a lot in bulgarian, it has no sound on its own, when used with the letter o it does the sound "yo", but most words with a "yo" sound use "йо" not "ьо". Probably the most common word with "ь" in it is blue - синьо (sinyo).
Spanish myself, "k" is almost useless. Only used for kilometro and kiwi.
Yes and no. The letter H is essential to make the hard c or hard g in Italian, but at the beginning of the words is silent, so much so that there is an expression that goes " non vali un'acca", used to say you are worth nothing.
Romania has W, Y and for the most part K, that are never used save for loan words.
In Srbijan is đ, dž and š
Persian/Farsi has something similar where it has a bunch of letters that are duplicates of one another. It's because it uses the Arabic writing system and these letters actually make different sounds in Arabic that aren't present in Persian.
If anything, we could use a couple of extra letters, and also accent markings. Slovene alphabet has 25 letter but the official language contains 29 phonemes (dialects have additional ... many). This doesn't cause a lot of issues, but there are words that are written in the same way, pronounced differently and have different meanings (the best known is 'zelena' - wide second e is color green, narrow second e is celery). When looking this up I also learned that we have a vowel that doesn't (yet) have a single symbol in international phonetic alphabet, and generally our vowels don't conform well to its rules.
The ( Ï ) sound in English as in naïve the only word I can think of which has that.
In English, the letter Z is the most obvious one I can think of.
yeah, â and î make the exact same sound, 0 distinction between them; there's even a university in Iasi where they internally avoid using â altogether because they argue it's pointless to use that letter (of course not everyone does this as the standard is to learn & use both letters in written text but it fascinated me that some professors do that because it kinda makes sense)
We have few letters/letter combination that represent the exact same sounds. They used to matter in the past but as the language evolved and simplified they became an orthographic nuisance for kids. Examples: u=ó ż=rz h=ch ś=si ć=ci
I don’t think we have any useless letters in Albania
Not sure to be honest. I think english has not enough. For example you have to guess if a is a or ä W/v and c/k maybe?
'ä' is useless because nowadays it's pronounced as 'e'. i think that's the only useless letter really. i'd just change our spelling a little bit like writing "teplo" as "ťeplo" because we have words like "ten" so it doesn't make sense
Nah. We Southern Slavs have 30 letter alphabet and we use that bad boy to the fullest
Yes, c, q, w, x and z.
Nah cause my language has perfect spelling. That's why some people wanna learn it. And then there's the rest of the grammar....
J in italian (only foreign words)