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A digraph or digram (from the (ギリシア語:δίς) ''dís'', "double" and γράφω ''gráphō'', "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. Digraphs are often used for phonemes that cannot be represented using a single character, like the English ''sh'' in ''ship'' and ''fish''. In other cases they may be relics from an earlier period of the language when they had a different pronunciation, or represent a distinction which is made only in certain dialects, like English ''wh''. They may also be used for purely etymological reasons, like ''rh'' in English. Digraphs are used in some Romanization schemes, like the ''zh'' often used to represent the Russian letter ж. As an alternative to digraphs, orthographies and Romanization schemes sometimes use letters with diacritics, like the Czech and Slovak ''š'', which has the same function as the English digraph ''sh''. In some languages' orthographies, digraphs (and occasionally trigraphs) are considered individual letters, meaning that they have their own place in the alphabet, and cannot be separated into their constituent graphemes, e.g. when sorting, abbreviating or hyphenating. Examples are found in Hungarian (''cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs''), Czech and Slovak (''ch''), and Croatian and the Latin orthography of Serbian (''lj, nj, dž''). In Dutch, when the digraph ''ij'' is capitalized, both letters are capitalized (''IJ''). Digraphs may develop into ligatures, but these are distinct concepts – a ligature involves a graphical combination of two characters, as when ''a'' and ''e'' are fused into ''æ''. ==Double letters== Digraphs may consist of two different characters (heterogeneous digraphs) or two instances of the same character (homogeneous digraphs). In the latter case, they are generally called double (or doubled) letters. Doubled vowel letters are commonly used to indicate a long vowel sound. This is the case in Finnish and Estonian, for instance, where represents a longer version of the vowel denoted by , represents a longer version of the vowel denoted by , and so on. In Middle English, the sequences and were used in a similar way, to represent lengthened "e" and "o" sounds respectively; these spellings have been retained in modern English orthography, but the Great Vowel Shift and other historical sound changes mean that the modern pronunciations are quite different from the original ones. Doubled consonant letters can also be used to indicate length, that is, that the consonant sound is geminated. In Italian, for example, consonants written double are pronounced longer than single ones. This was the original meaning of doubled consonants in Old English, but during the Middle English and Early Modern English period this developed into a spelling convention whereby a doubled consonant serves to indicated that a preceding vowel is to be pronounced short. In modern English, for example, the of ''tapping'' differentiates the first vowel sound from that of ''taping''. Consonants are only geminated in rare cases where they come from different morphemes, as with the in ''unnatural'' (''un''+''natural''). Some doubled consonants represent distinct sounds. For example: *In Welsh, stands for a voiceless lateral consonant, while in Spanish and Catalan it stands for a palatal consonant. *In several languages of western Europe, including English, French and Catalan, is used between vowels for the voiceless sibilant , since an alone between vowels is normally voiced, . *In Spanish and Catalan, is used between vowels for the alveolar trill , since an alone between vowels represents an alveolar flap (the two are different phonemes in these languages). *In Spanish the digraph formerly indicated (a palatal nasal); it developed into the letter ñ. *In Basque, double letters mark palatalized versions, as in , , . However, is a trill contrasting with the single-letter flap, as in Spanish, and the palatal version of is written . In many European writing systems, including the English one, the doubling of the letter or is represented as the heterogeneous digraph instead of or respectively. In native German words, the doubling of , which corresponds to , is replaced by the digraph . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Digraph (orthography)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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