Digraph (orthography)

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In Welsh, the digraph ‹Ll›, ‹ll› fused for a time into a ligature.
Further information: list of Latin digraphs and list of Cyrillic digraphs

A digraph or digram (from the Greek: δίς, dís, "double" and γράφω, gráphō, "write") 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. Usually, the term "digraph" is reserved for graphemes whose pronunciation is always or nearly always the same.

When digraphs do not represent a special sound, they may be relics from an earlier period of the language when they did have a different pronunciation, or represent a distinction which is made only in certain dialects, like wh in English. They may also be used for purely etymological reasons, like rh in English.

In some language orthographies, like that of Serbian (when written with the Latin alphabet) or Czech (ch), digraphs are considered individual letters, meaning that they have their own place in the alphabet, in the standard orthography, and cannot be separated into their constituent graphemes; e.g.: when sorting, abbreviating or hyphenating. In others, like English, this is not the case.

Some schemes of Romanization make extensive use of digraphs (e.g. Cyrillic to Roman for English readers), while others rely solely on diacritics (e.g. Cyrillic to the modified Roman used for Turkish). To avoid ambiguity, transliteration based on diacritics is generally preferred in academic circles. Many languages, like Serbian (written in Cyrillic) and Turkish, have no digraphs, and so transliterations into these languages also cannot use digraphs.

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[edit] Types of digraphs

Various patterns are discernible in the form of digraphs. In English, consonant digraphs tend largely to consist of some letter plus aitch, or to be double letters. Doubling is a common digraph strategy in many orthographies.

Heterogeneous consonant digraphs in English include:

Digraphs may also be composed of vowels. Common examples in English are:

  • ‹ea› pronounced /iː/, /ɛ/, or /eɪ/.
  • ‹ie› pronounced /iː/ or /aɪ/
  • ‹ai› usually pronounced /eɪ/.
  • ‹ei› usually pronounced /iː/, more rarely /aɪ/.
  • ‹au› pronounced /ɔː/.
  • ‹eu› usually pronounced /juː/.
  • ‹ou› usually pronounced /aʊ/, more rarely /uː/.
  • ‹oo› pronounced /uː/ ("soon") or /ʊ/ ("foot")
  • ‹aw› pronounced /ɔː/.
  • ‹ew› usually pronounced /juː/.
  • ‹ow› pronounced /aʊ/ or /oʊ/.

For further information on English, see English orthography.

In some languages doubled letters indicate consonant length or vowel length, a stressed syllable or a specific sound, but in other cases they are just part of the spelling convention. ‹Ll› is the most common in English, though it does not represent a different sound from ‹l›, being essentially an etymological digraph. In Welsh, however, ‹ll› stands for a voiceless lateral, and in Spanish it stands for a palatal consonant. ‹Ee› and ‹oo› are vocalic examples from English.

In several languages of western Europe, including English and French, ‹ss› is used between vowels for the voiceless sibilant /s/, since an ‹s› alone between vowels is normally voiced, /z/. In German, an this digraph was fused into the ligature ß.

In Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian, rr is used between vowels for the alveolar trill /r/, since an r alone between vowels represents an alveolar flap /ɾ/ (the two are different phonemes in these languages).

  • In Spanish the digraph nn, which used to indicate /ɲ/ (palatal nasal), was turned into the letter ñ, while ll indicates /ʎ/ (traditionally a palatal lateral approximant, though it has several dialectal variants in modern Spanish).
  • In Italian, zz (as in the word pizza) is an affricate, /ts/ or /dz/.

In several Germanic languages, including English, CC (where C stands for a given consonant) corresponds to C and signifies that the preceding vowel is short.

In Basque, double letters mark palatalized versions as in dd, ll, tt. Note however that rr is a trill contrasting with the single-letter flap and that the palatal version of n is ñ.

[edit] Pan-dialectical digraphs

Some languages have a unified orthography with digraphs that represent distinct pronunciations in different dialects. For example, in Breton there is a digraph zh that is pronounced [z] in most dialects, but [h] in Vannetais. Similarly, the Saintongeais dialect of French has a digraph jh that is pronounced [h] in words that correspond to [ʒ] in standard French.

[edit] Ambiguity

Some letter pairs should not be interpreted as digraphs, but appear due to compounding, like in hogshead and cooperate. This is often not marked in any way (it is an exception which must simply be memorized), but some authors indicate it either by breaking up the digraph with a hyphen, as in hogs-head, co-operate, or with a diaeresis mark, as in coöperate, though usage of a diaeresis has declined in English within the last century.

In Czech also (and analogically in other Slavic languages), double letters may appear in compound words, but they are not considered digraphs. Examples: bezzubý (bez + zubý, toothless), cenný (cen + ný, valuable), černooký (černo + oký, black-eyed).

[edit] Discontinuous digraphs

The pair of letters making up a phoneme are not always adjacent. This is the case with English silent e. For example, the sequence a…e has the sound /eɪ/ in English cake. This is the result of historical sound changes: cake was originally /kakə/, the open syllable /ka/ came to be pronounced with a long vowel, and later the final schwa dropped off, leaving /kaːk/. Later still, the vowel /aː/ became /eɪ/.

However, alphabets may also be designed with discontinuous digraphs. In the Tatar Cyrillic alphabet, for example, the letter ю is used to write both /ju/ and /jy/. Usually the difference is evident from the rest of the word, but when it is not, the sequence ю...ь is used for /jy/, as in юнь /jyn/ 'cheap'.

The Indic alphabets are famous for their discontinuous vowels, such as Thai เ…อ /ɤː/ in เกอ /kɤː/. Technically, however, these are diacritics, not full letters; whether they are digraphs is thus a matter of definition.

[edit] Digraphs versus letters

In some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are counted as distinct letters in themselves, and assigned to a specific place in the alphabet, separate from that of the sequence of characters which composes them, in orthography or collation. Other languages, such as English, make no such convention, and split digraphs into their constituent letters for collation purposes. A few language alphabets that include digraphs are:

  • Danish and Norwegian. Aa represented /ɔ/ until 1917 in Norway and 1948 in Denmark, but is today spelt å. The aa is still used in older names.
  • Spanish. In addition to ll (see above), there is the digraph ch, which represents /tʃ/ (voiceless postalveolar affricate). Both are considered part of the alphabet. They used to be sorted as separate letters, but a reform in 1994 by the Spanish Royal Academy has allowed that they be split into their constituent letters for collation. Note that the digraph rr has never been included in the Spanish alphabet, in spite of having a distinct pronunciation (alveolar trill).

[edit] In non-Latin alphabets

Digraphs are found in alphabets other than the Latin alphabet.

[edit] Greek

Modern Greek has the following digraphs:

  • αι (ai) represents /e̞/
  • ει (ei) represents /i/
  • οι (oi) represents /i/
  • ου (ou) represents /u/
  • υι (yi) represents /i/

These are called "diphthongs" in Greek; in Classical times they did represent diphthongs, and the name has stuck.

  • γγ (gg) represents /ŋɡ/ or /ɡ/
  • τσ represents the affricate /ts/
  • τζ represents the affricate /dz/
  • Initial γκ (gk) represents /ɡ/
  • Initial μπ (mp) represents /b/
  • Initial ντ (nt) represents /d/

[edit] Arabic

Because vowels are not generally written, digraphs are rare in abjads like Arabic. For example, if sh were used for š, then the sequence sh could mean either ša or saha. However, digraphs are used for the aspirated and murmured consonants (those spelled with h-digraphs in Latin transcription) in languages of South Asia such as Urdu that are written in the Arabic script. This is accomplished with a special form of the letter h which is only used for aspiration digraphs, as seen with the following connecting (kh) and non-connecting (ḍh) consonants:

Urdu connecting   non-connecting
digraph: کھا /kʰɑː/ ڈھا /ɖʱɑː/
sequence:  کﮩا /kəɦɑː/ ڈﮨا /ɖəɦɑː/

[edit] Cyrillic

Main article: Cyrillic digraphs

Modern Russian and other Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet makes little use of digraphs apart from <дж> for /dʐ/ (in loan words only in Russian, but used for native words in Bulgarian), <дз> for /dz/ (in loans), and <жж> for the uncommon Russian phoneme /ʑː/. Cyrillic only has large numbers of digraphs when used to write non-Slavic languages, especially Caucasian languages.

[edit] Georgian

The Georgian alphabet uses a few diacritics when writing other languages. For example, in Svan, /ø/ is ჳე "we", and /y/ is ჳი "wi".

[edit] Hangul

As was the case in Greek, Korean has vowels descended from diphthongs that are still written with two letters. These digraphs, ㅐ /ɛ/ and ㅔ /e/ (also ㅒ /jɛ/, ㅖ /je/), and in some dialects ㅚ /ø/ and ㅟ /y/, all end in historical ㅣ /i/.

Hangul was designed with a digraph series to represent the "muddy" consonants of Chinese: ㅃ *[b̥], ㄸ *[d̥], ㅉ *[d̥z̥], ㄲ *[ɡ̊], ㅆ *[z̥], ㆅ *[ɣ̊]; also ᅇ, with an uncertain value. These values are now obsolete, but most of these doubled letters were resurrected in the 19th century to write consonants which had not existed when hangul was devised: ㅃ /p͈/, ㄸ /t͈/, ㅉ /t͈ɕ/, ㄲ /k͈/, ㅆ /s͈/.

[edit] Brahmi scripts

Indic scripts do not use digraphs for consonants. However, most have compound vowel diacritics. Though perhaps not technically digraphs, since they are not full letters, a number of them have the appearance of full letters on the page. This can be illustrated with Thai:

single vowel sign: กา /kaː/, เก /keː/, กอ /kɔː/
vowel sign plus เ: เกา /kaw/, แก /kɛː/, เกอ /kɤː/

[edit] Yiddish

The Hebrew alphabet has no digraphs for writing Hebrew, except that תס and תש are sometimes found for צ /ts/. However, in Yiddish there are also דז /dz/, זש /ʒ/, תש /tʃ/, and דזש (literally dzš) for /dʒ/. י may also be used following a consonant to indicate palatalization in Slavic loanwords.

[edit] American Sign Language

In ASL, a multigraph of the American manual alphabet is used to sign 'I love you', from the English initialism ILY. It consists of the little finger of the letter I plus the thumb and forefinger of the letter L. It is conceived of as a trigraph of the letters I-L-Y, but the letter Y (little finger and thumb) overlaps with the other two letters.

[edit] Japanese braille

Japanese braille is a syllabary. It divides the braille cell in two, with the three dots of the upper left determining the consonant, and the three of the lower right determining the vowel. Thus each syllable except for the plain vowels and the syllable coda n could be considered a digraph. However, since the consonants cannot occur on their own, it might more accurately be described as an abugida, with vowels modified by consonant diacritics.

[edit] Semaphore

The Peace sign ☮ is a stylized digraph of semaphore ND, standing for Nuclear Disarmament.

[edit] Digraphs in Unicode

Generally, a digraph is simply represented using two characters in Unicode.[1] However, for various reasons, Unicode sometimes provides a separate code point for a digraph, encoded as a single character.

[edit] Latin alphabet

The digraph DZ and the Croatian digraphs DŽ, LJ, and NJ have separate code points in Unicode.

Two Glyphs Digraph Unicode Code Point
DZ, Dz, dz DZ, Dz, dz U+01F1, U+01F2, U+01F3
DŽ, Dž, dž DŽ, Dž, dž U+01C4, U+01C5, U+01C6
LJ, Lj, lj LJ, Lj, lj U+01C7, U+01C8, U+01C9
NJ, Nj, nj NJ, Nj, nj U+01CA, U+01CB, U+01CC

See also Ligatures in Unicode.

[edit] Notes and references

  1. ^ "FAQ - Ligatures, Digraphs and Presentation Forms". The Unicode Consortium: Home Page. Unicode Inc. 1991–2009. http://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-11. 

[edit] See also

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