Other Letters
In addition to being used to indicate a hard ⟨c⟩ or ⟨g⟩ before front vowels, ⟨h⟩ is also used to distinguish ho, hai, ha, hanno (present indicative of avere, 'to have') from o ('or'), ai ('to the'), a ('to'), anno ('year'); since ⟨h⟩ is always silent, there is no difference in the pronunciation of such words. In foreign loanwords, the h is still silent: hovercraft /ˈɔverkraft/.
⟨Z⟩ represents an alveolar affricate consonant; either voiced /dz/ (zanzara /dzanˈdzara/ 'mosquito') or voiceless /ts/ (nazione /naˈttsjone/ 'nation'), depending on context, though there are few minimal pairs.
⟨S⟩ also is ambiguous to voicing; it can represent /s/ or /z/. However, these two phonemes are in complementary distribution everywhere except between two vowels in the same word and, even in such environments, there are very few minimal pairs.
The letters J ("I lunga" ), K ("cappa"), W ("V doppia" or "doppia V" ), X ("ics") and Y ("ipsilon" or "I greca" ) are used for loanwords only.
Read more about this topic: Italian Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the word letters:
“This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)