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
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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