Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
Though I couldn’t possibly give any grammatical or etymological reason for this, I think it’s cool how some seemingly extraneous and unnecessary silent letters are like “sleeper agents” which become “activated” when you add a suffix (and sometimes even a prefix).
Examples:
GN: sign — signal, signature; gnostic — agnostic
GM: paradigm — paradigmatic
MB: bomb — bombastic
MN: hymn — hymnal; damn — damnation
UI: fruit — fruition
They were often not silent in the past, but I have a compeling reason to keep them, if that’s what you’re asking.
They help you understand the underlying meaning and etimology of words.
Imagine that instead of sign, you would write sine. sounds the same, only a much more “logical” spelling. You would be obscuring the connection between the word sign and signature, where the g is not silent.
it sometimes connects the word to it’s roots, like light (who we should maybe write as lite), comes from (the same origin, possibly, as) the german licht. we don’t pronounce the hard ch sound like in german, but it shows us something about the origin of this word, though. many words that are spelled with gh and have this sound are also from german, not a perfect correlation, but a perfectly good rule of thumb.
In addition to all the other answers, one thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that while some letters might be silent, they’re not always *purposeless*. For example, if you take nearly any three letter word in English that follows the pattern consonant-vowel-consonant (which there are MANY), the vowel will be “short”. But if you put an “e” on the end of that word, the “e” is silent but it makes the other vowel be pronounced “long”.
Examples:
* sin –> sine
* car –> care
* ton –> tone
* met –> mete
* cut –> cute
Linguistics and the development of human language can basically be booked down to “why waste time say lot sound when few sound do trick”
In some cases they may seem silent, but slightly alter the phenome. My last name starts with dze, and it makes the sound of a d while your mouth is in the shape for a z. My name is weird
Just something to think about:
Things like Shope, could just be for style or societal norms. Like Ye olde in English, vs. “the old” in modern English. Old is the same but the spelling is different simply because… Style?
Things like Pterydactyl or Ptolemy could either be because someone just felt like it or another (older) word that it was derived or translated from had another slightly different pronunciation that required the extra letter.
TL:DR there are many extremely arbitrary and often subtle reasons that are in no way functional, which is why we can still use them.
I am talking for French mostly. I am not sure if this is true for other languages.
First reason is that it was not silent long time ago. They used to pronounce everything, but the spelling is evolving faster than the writing.
Second reason is that the clerks or monks used to copy the books (handwriting before the invention of the printer) they were paid by the length of the writing. Thus adding many silent letters was increasing the amount of money they were making.
“spell boscodictiasaur?” “Um.. B-O-S..” “no I’m sorry, it starts with a silent M!
The answers below have mainly focused on English spelling. I just thought it worth pointing out other languages have “silent” letters too. For example, Hebrew has two. Apparently they are not actually silent, and the difference between them amounts to subtle differences in glottal stop. But I’m no scholar.
Thrn of course there’s the confusion caused by Irish spelling, which seems to have a bunch of unnecessary letters. Some are due to similar shift in sound over time resulting in diphthongs and the like, and done are to differentiate between “broad” and “slender” consonant sounds so that the word is clear when written (even if it seems infuriating to a newcomer).
One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that early modern scholars were big fans of latin (this is also the origin of ‘you can’t end a sentence with a preposition’ which was true for latin but not for english). There were several words which had changed pronunciation, where some letters stopped being pronounced. And this *was* reflected in the spelling, but the latin-fans changed them back. Off the top of my head, ‘debt’ was often spelled ‘dette’, but the b was reinserted because it was present (and pronounced) in the latin root.
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