eli5 What is the word for a vowel and a consonant?

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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.

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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