What I mean is, if I were to make a list of them, what would I name the list?
What’s a word for both of them?
Sorry if this is silly but I have trouble looking stuff like this up. Thanks for your time!
Edit: Thanks everyone! I think the word I was looking for was “phoneme”.
Sorry, I probably didn’t ask this clearly enough I was trying to find the word for the types of letters.
In: 3
Well, vowels and consonants are letters, and a list of them would be an alphabet. But, interestingly, if you had a writing system that didn’t contain vowels, like Arabic, you wouldn’t be able to call it an alphabet. Alphabets have to contain vowels, so if something doesn’t, it’s just a writing system.
If you mean the symbols we use in English to represent both vowels and consonants it would be “Letters”.
If you mean vowel sounds and consonant sounds, together they are “Phonemes”.
Wouldn’t you call it “the alphabet”?
Unless I grossly misunderstand the question, a list of the letters in the alphabet.
You may be thinking of syllables. These are vowel sounds with consonant sounds either before, after, or both and are the building blocks of speech.
I’m not aware of a specific term for syllables that are written in English as a single vowel and a single consonant. It wouldn’t be a very useful category, because many syllables are written with more than two letters, and not necessarily because they’re more complex. English spelling is just weird.
For example, “though” is a single syllable written with 2 vowels and 4 consonants. But if you change the consonant sound from “th” to “g”, you’re down to 2 letters with “go”.
You could also be thinking of digraphs (e.g., the “ph” sound) and blends (e.g., the “bl” sound).
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