Non-Distinctive

Entertainment / Literature / Non-Distinctive: In linguistics, any two sounds (often quite similar) that are not capable of signaling a difference in meaning. For instance, in Chinese, the letter t can be aspirated or unaspirated. This slight difference in sound can create two entirely different words. The Greeks also had the same sound distinction, and represented this by using both the letter theta and tau. However, in Roman Latin and modern English, the difference in aspiration is ignored, and both sounds are represented by a single letter. Since the two sounds are non-distinctive, creating two different letters for each one is unnecessary in Latin and English.
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