Pentagraph - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A pentagraph is a sequence of five letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds, that do not necessarily correspond to the individual values of the letters. In German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, for example, the pentagraph tzsch represents the [tʃ] sound of the English digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

ch. Irish

Irish orthography

Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries, since Old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 6th century AD. Prior to that, Primitive Irish was written in Ogham...

has a number of pentagraphs. English, like most languages, has none.

List of pentagraphs

Irish
Used between a velarized
Velarization
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of three diacritics:...

("broad") and a platalized
Palatalization
In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....

("slender") consonant:

To write the sound /əu̯/ (in Donegal

Donegal

Donegal or Donegal Town is a town in County Donegal, Ireland. Its name, which was historically written in English as Dunnagall or Dunagall, translates from Irish as "stronghold of the foreigners" ....

, /oː/):

⟨abhai⟩, ⟨amhai⟩, ⟨obhai⟩, ⟨odhai⟩, and ⟨oghai⟩

To write the sound /əi̯/ (in Donegal

Donegal

, /eː/):

⟨adhai⟩, ⟨aghai⟩

To write the sound /əi̯/:

⟨oidhi⟩ and ⟨oighi⟩

To write the sound /oː/:

⟨omhai⟩

Used between a slender and a broad consonant:

To write the sound /əu̯/ (in Donegal

Donegal

, /oː/):

⟨eabha⟩ and ⟨eamha⟩

To write the sound /əi̯/ (in Donegal

Donegal

, /eː/):

⟨eadha⟩

Used between two slender consonants:

To write the sound /əi̯/: ⟨eidhi⟩ and ⟨eighi⟩

German
⟨tzsch⟩ was once used in German to write the sound /tʃ/. It has largely been replaced by the tetragraph

Tetragraph

A tetragraph is a sequence of four letters used to represent a single sound , or a combination of sounds, that do not necessarily correspond to the individual values of the letters. In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch...

⟨tsch⟩, but is still found in proper name

Proper name

"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...

s such as Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

.

Cyrillic
In the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

used for languages of the Caucasus

Languages of the Caucasus

The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....

, there are a couple five-letter sequences used for 'strong' (typically transcribed in the IPA as geminate, and doubled in Cyrillic) labialized consonants. Since both features are predictable from the orthography, their pentagraph status is dubious.

The pentagraph ⟨ххьӀв⟩ is used in Archi

Archi language

Archi is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the 1,200 Archis in the village of Archib, southern Dagestan, Russia and the six surrounding smaller villages...

for [χːˤʷ]: a labialized

Labialisation

Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve the lips, they are called rounded.The most common...

⟨ххьI⟩ [χːˤ], which is the 'strong

Fortis and lenis

In linguistics, fortis and lenis are terms generally used to refer to groups of consonants that are produced with greater and lesser energy, respectively, such as in energy applied, articulation, etc....

' counterpart of the pharyngealized

Pharyngealisation

-Further reading:*Ian Maddieson, -See also:*Velarization*Creaky voice *Pharyngeal consonant*Epiglottal consonant*Pharynx...

voiceless uvular fricative ([χˤ]), written using the trigraph ⟨хьI⟩, whose graph is in turn an unpredictable derivation of ⟨х⟩ ([χ]) and thus a true trigraph.