Silent letter

Both Faroese silent letters edd and ge are replaced by a hiatus glide consonant ([j], [v] or [w]) when followed by another (unstressed) vowel.

The long i-sound /iː/ is usually written ⟨ie⟩, with a silent ⟨e⟩, as in viel (much), spielen (to play), Wien ('Vienna'), and hundreds of other words.

Country names in -ien can also be joined to this group: Australien, Brasilien, Indien, Kroatien, Serbien, Slowenien.

Other silent letters occur mainly in borrowings from French and other modern languages; e.g., Porträt (portrait), Korps (corps).

Informally, the letter ⟨t⟩ may be silent in function words like ist (is), jetzt (now), nicht (not), and otherwise in clusters like Gedächtnis (memory), Kunststück (piece of art).

[citation needed] Final ⟨e⟩ is silent or at least (in poetry and song) a nearly-silent schwa /ə/; it allows the preservation of a preceding consonant, often allowing the preservation of a grammatical distinction between masculine and feminine forms in writing; e.g., in vert and verte (both 'green'); the ⟨t⟩ is pronounced in the latter (feminine) but not the former.

Most final consonants are silent, except in most cases with the letters ⟨c⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨l⟩, and ⟨r⟩ (the English word careful is a mnemonic for this set).

The letter ⟨h⟩ most often marks a ⟨c⟩/⟨g⟩ as hard (velar), as in spaghetti and scherzo, where it would otherwise be soft (palatal), as in gelato and cello, because of a following front vowel (⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩).

Silent ⟨h⟩ is also used in forms of the verb avere ('have') – ho, hai and hanno – to distinguish these from their homophones o ('or'), ai ('to the') and anno ('year').

European Portuguese's orthography used to conserve the etymological silent letters ⟨c⟩ and ⟨p⟩ when they appeared after a vowel and before the consonants ⟨t⟩, ⟨ç⟩ or soft ⟨c⟩.

Their purpose was to prevent the preceding vowel's deafening, compare adoptar [ɐdoˈtaɾ] (adopt), contracção [kõtɾaˈsɐ̃w] (contraction) and inspeccionar [ĩʃpesiuˈnaɾ] (inspect) to adjacente [ɐdʒɐˈsẽtɨ] (adjacent), completar [kõpɫɨˈtaɾ] (complete) and noção [nuˈsɐ̃w] (noction).

However, the latest Portuguese orthographic reform removed them from the language entirely, meaning that enlarged vowels and deafened vowels cannot be distinguished solely by spelling anymore, the main reason for this change was that Brazilian Portuguese's spelling had already stopped writing these mute consonants, and thus they were a figure of divergence between the two countries' way of writing.

The ⟨u⟩ in the diphthong ⟨ou⟩ is not generally pronounced in Standard Lisbon Portuguese[5] and some Brazilian dialects, which results in words like Sousa and Gouveia being said as "Sosa" and "Goveia" respectively.

However, ⟨h⟩ is present in three digraphs and one trigraph (ch, lh, nh and tch), which is where this letter is mainly found affecting the word's pronunciation.

⟨x⟩ is normally deemed as silent when behind a soft ⟨c⟩ or the letter ⟨s⟩, like in the words excelência, excisar or exsudar, but some people consider ⟨xc⟩ and ⟨xs⟩ to just be digraphs.

There is an extremely specific and limited group of words whose mute consonants can currently be preserved, but only when they occur at the end of them, these are onomastic forms in which the usage has consecrated them, namely anthroponyms and toponyms of biblical tradition like Jacob, Job, Isaac, David, Gad, Gog, Magog and Josafat.

For example: dcera (daughter) and in srdce (heart) In most present forms of the verb být ("to be"), namely jsem, jsi, jsme, jste and jsou (i.e., all persons but the third-person singular je), the initial cluster /js/ is regularly simplified to a mere /s/.

Examples: The explanation for this phenomenon is that the Hebrew language had a sound change of all the mater lectionis aleph letters into silent ones (see Canaanite shift).

Tamil is a classical language phonetically characterized by allophones, approximants, nasals and glottalised sounds.

That being said, modern words like ஆஃபிஸ் (Office) use 'ஃ' and 'ப' in sequence to represent the /f/ sound, as the āytam is nowadays also used to transcribe it and other foreign phonemes.

Another convention in Middle Tamil (Sen-Tamil) is the use of silent vowels to address a mark of respect when beginning proper nouns.

However, it is considered disrespectful to change this pronunciation in the simple present verbs, when using imperatives and using what can be termed as Imperative-Active voice in Malayalam, where the second person is respectfully addressed with his or her name instead of നീ (/n̪i:/, you) or നിങ്ങൽ (/n̪iŋaɭ/, yourselves).

For example, বিশ্বাস (শ্ব = শ্ 'sh' + ব) (to believe) is written as " bishbāsh" but pronounced as " bishāsh" with more stress on the sh than usual, which sounds like "bishshāsh".

The letter য় ('y') is also silent in many cases as in "মেয়ে" (য়ে = য় + এ 'ē') (girl) is written as "mēyē" but pronounced as "mē".

Sometimes it is completely silent as in সন্ধ্যা (ন্ধ্যা = ন্ 'n' + ধ 'dh' + য + আ 'ā') (evening) is written as "shondhjā" but pronounced as "shondhā".

For example, a romanization of the word ประโยชน์ that reflects Thai orthography is prayochṅ, but it would be pronounced as prayot, where the extra letter for -n is completely silent.

Also, different letters can be used for the same sound (for example, [tʰ] can be spelled as ฐ, ฑ, ฒ, ถ, ท, or ธ) depending on which class the consonant is, which is important for knowing which tone the syllable will have, and whether or not it is a loanword from Sanskrit or Pali.

The letter is ho sung ຫ, which would represent the sound /h/ if it were not paired with another low class consonant.

For example, in the word 안녕 (Yale Romanization: annyeng) (meaning "hello"), composed of the letters "ㅇㅏㄴㄴㅕㅇ", the first ⟨ㅇ⟩ is silent, and the last ⟨ㅇ⟩ is pronounced as /ŋ/.

However, the word 얇아서 (also meaning "thin") is written as (Yale: yalp.a.se) and it is pronounced as yal.pa.se because the second syllable begins with a vowel sound.