HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

A multigraph (or pleongraph) is a sequence of letters that behaves as a unit and is not the sum of its parts, such as English or French . The term is infrequently used, as the number of letters is usually specified: * Digraph (two letters, as or ) * Trigraph (three letters, as or ) * Tetragraph (four letters, as German ) * Pentagraph (five letters) * Hexagraph (six letters) * Heptagraph (seven letters) Combinations longer than tetragraphs are unusual. The German pentagraph has largely been replaced by , remaining only in proper names such as or . Except for doubled trigraphs like German , hexagraphs are found only in Irish vowels, where the outside letters indicate whether the neighboring consonant is " broad" or " slender". However, these sequences are not predictable. The hexagraph , for example, where the and mark the consonants as broad, represents the same sound (approximately the vowel in English ''write'') as the trigraph , and with the same effect on neighboring consonants. The seven-letter German sequence , used to transliterate Ukrainian , as in for "
borscht Borscht () is a sour soup common in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. In English, the word "borscht" is most often associated with the soup's variant of Ukrainian origin, made with red beetroots as one of the main ingredients, which g ...
", is a sequence of a trigraph and a tetragraph rather than a heptagraph. Likewise, the Juu languages have been claimed to have a heptagraph , but this is also a sequence, of and . Beyond the Latin alphabet,
Morse code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one ...
uses hexagraphs for several punctuation marks, and the dollar sign is a heptagraph, . Longer sequences are considered ligatures, and are transcribed as such in the Latin alphabet.


See also

* Unigraph (orthography) {{ling-stub