As my daughter is LEARNING the English LANGUAGE, I find it more difficult to explain to her WHY certain things happen. For instance, as this list shows, at least half the letters of the alphabet will appear in a word but will be silent. So my response to my daughter is “Don’t ask.”
To be fair, the real reason for these seeming discrepencies is that English is a LANGUAGE rooted in multiple LINGUISTIC traditions.
OK, so I’ve sussed out the logic of the silent E, which (usually) means the vowel is long.
But other letters I understand less well, particularly those silent letters that appear in the beginning of a word.
I have learned, however that:
Silent B is often after m.
Silent G is often before m or n, and that the Greek root in a word such as gnome did sound the G.
Silent H is …complicated, and appears sometimes sounded, sometimes not, in many languages.
Silent K before n once WAS sounded. The silent ‘k’ in words like ‘knight’, ‘knock’ and ‘knob’ is a remnant of Old English, and wasn’t silent at all but was pronounced along with the ‘n’. “Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries. For some reason, the ‘kn’ consonant cluster became hard for English speakers to pronounce.”
Why is the letter -L- silent in words such as salmon and solder? “In those two cases, the English spelling originally did not have an L, so there was no such letter to pronounce.”
Silent P often appears before n, s, t.
And here’s some background on Silent T and Silent W.
Yet, I tend to oppose the movement to simplify English spelling. I would find it unreadable, as I do in this example. The LOOPINESS of the LANGUAGE is also its beauty, its charm, its LIVELINESS.
ABC Wednesday – Round 8
