Comments on: Quadrigraph Sighting

By: Peter Collier

Peter Collier — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:42:57 +0000

German uses “DSCH” for the voiced palato-alveolar affricate: the phoneme represented in English by “J”.

It’s rare – it only occurs in loanwords like “DSCHUNGEL” (“JUNGLE”) – but it’s there!

By: Robert Beard

Robert Beard — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 05:13:09 +0000

These four letters represent four sounds. The Danish quadrigraph is four letters that represent a SINGLE sound. Consonant clusters of up to five letters are common in Russian and other languages. But four that stand for only one sound is a genuine rarity.

By: bnjtokyo

bnjtokyo — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 02:56:41 +0000

How about “draftsman” in English? The root “draft” ends in two articulated consonants [ft], The plural or third person singular ends in three [fts] which are articulated in careful speech. In normal speech the [t] in “draftsman” would be omitted, but I think it would be retained in careful speech.

By: Paul Ogden

Paul Ogden — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 19:01:41 +0000

I can barely be said to speak German — stumbling about in that language is more like it — but I believe the quadrigraph tsch is used to represent English ch.

As well, I think it’s fair to say that when the languages/dialects of the Hmong people are written in the Romanized Popular Alphabet, they contain a number of quadrigraphs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hmong_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanized_Popular_Alphabet