Edit: thanks, but I’m more interested in speech rather than writing. This question is from an actual 5 year old.
Edit: please be patient, I’m definitely confused.
Back story,
I’m trying to teach my kid spellings using phonetics (like they do in their schooll. So far kid is doing great except the words with silents. One thing led to another and I had to ask this here.
In: 2
I’m going to assume you mean letters.
There are numerous reasons.
One is that the letter used to make a sound but a change in how the word is pronounced has left the letter not making a sound. Eg. Knight
Some were added by dictionaries to show the etymology (history) of the word (some words had their spellings changed to reflect the language the word originally came from) and in some cases it was actually a false etymology (it was thought that the word came from a word and/or a language that it didn’t). Eg. Island. It was thought that it was related to isle and so an S was added. Isle though came from the latin insular while island turned out to be an English word that didn’t have an s.
With the above too the word may have just kept its original spelling or thereabouts when borrowed from another language and that language has different rules regarding phonetics.
Some are silent in that you don’t pronounce that letter in particular but it changes how another letter or letters are pronounced. The so called magic E.
Edit:
Changed the island/isle around as I double checked and had it backwards.
Edit:
Just saw your edit that you made after I posted this. Speech doesn’t have any letters. Speech only has sounds. Writing has letters.
Sometimes it’s needed to make a letter before or after it make a certain sound. Sometimes it’s a spelling variation so that a word with the same sound has a different spelling (e.g. knot and not)
Sometimes it’s visual appeal. Sometimes it’s nothing at all
If you’re making a distinction between speech and writing then your premise is false. There are no silent letters in speech, only in writing.
Phonics is a series of sounds made up of letters that combine to make our words. Different combinations of letters can be grouped into similar “sounds”. The silent letters are hangovers from English being make from so many different languages eg Latin, Greek, German, French and more. If you’d like to see a poster that groups the sounds, checkout THRASS https://www.thrass.com.au/product/t-102-picturechart-class-size/
First: I want to [share this.](https://youtube.com/c/PreschoolPrepCompany) My son watched all of these videos over and over to learn phonics and it helped a lot.
Second: English was not written down until the French invaded. They did not have letters for all of the sounds that English has. So they tried to combine letters to approximate the sound: “th” and “gh” are examples of this.
Third: In some cases like Knife and Knight, English just stopped saying the “k”, but left the spelling.
Forth: for silent e, I am not sure the origin, but it uses the “vowel-consonant-vowel makes the first vowel long” rule very nicely.
English is only really partly phonetic; in many cases the silent letters reflect the origin of a word–you can think of them as being vestigial.
In addition to the good examples others have brought up, this is also true with loanwords. You can see this happening now: words are often “Romanicized”–which essentially tries to preserve a sensible map between the spelling in the source language and English–and not (as some people assume) “transliterated” (i.e., spelled phonetically).
For this reason we often get what seems like extraneous letters–and letters that are silent or subtle in the source language (such as the silent terminal ‘t’ in French words) or don’t have a clear phonetic map into English (such as the ‘ch’ from Hebrew) are preserved.
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