Silent Letters

October 21, 2018

Author: Robert Smith

Why Some English Words Have Silent Letters?

The rogue knight doubted that the asthmatic knave in knickers could climb

the castle columns, but when their wrangle wrought chaos on the couple, the

knight resigned with the knowledge that their tight-knit friendship wouldn’t

succumb to dumb disputes.

If we pronounce every single letter we see in the ridiculous phrase above,

it would sound a lot different than what we just read in our mind.

The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. However,

these words were not always intended to be so confusing. In many cases,

these silent letters actually were pronounced, such as when "knight" sounded

like "kniht" or "bite" sounded like "beetuh."

Other words with silent letters are borrowed from other languages. For

example,

Tsunami à Japanese word

Psychology à Greek words "psyche" and "logica"

However, "ts" and "ps" are not used to start words in English, so the first

letters became silent to meet English language’s phonological rules.

Approximately 60% of English words contain a silent letter.

The main reasons

Great Vowel Shift: a major phonetic change in the Middle Ages that

affected how long vowels were spoken

Some changes are marked by the silent "e," which makes "rid" an

entirely different word than "ride." This usage makes "e" a diacritic letter

(a letter that is not pronounced but changes the pronunciation of another

syllable).

Ego:
Some people with influence over how the English language would evolve

added extra letters simply because they could.

Scholarly changes:
Scholars added the silent "b" to "doubt" to educate the "oblivious

public" on the word’s derivation from the Latin "dubitare." All they did was

turn "dout" into "doubt" when no one asked for an unnecessary consonant.

Take home message

While silent letters may seem useless at times, it is almost impossible to

ignore them because they play such a prominent role in the English language.

Silent letters help to distinguish between homophones (words with the same

sound but different spellings and meanings) in writing. Thanks to silent

letters, we know the difference between two, to, and too! In manuscript editing always refer to a dictionary when in doubt on how to pronounce (or not pronounce a letter) in a word.

Resources used -

Enago Academy by Enago - https://www.enago.com/academy