Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
Oh I know this one! Because they used to not be.
I asked a Spanish teacher once why H’s are silent and he explained that they weren’t always silent.
Take the english word “name” he said. It used to be pronounced “nah-may”, but over time, we emphasized the first vowel more and more until the m sound merged with the long A and the E became silent.
Some silent letters were pronounced by themselves and some changed the way letters around them sounded. But eventually the pronunciation shifted, but the spelling did not.
Edit to add: and we have to keep the spelling because how a word looks signifies its root origins so we can know its meaning. (Weigh vs Way, Weight vs Wait)
Changes in pronunciation. Knight used to be pronounced k-nig-it but over time pronunciation changed but the spelling did not
Different silent letters are there for different reasons.
Some are there because they didn’t used to be silent. The K in knife and knight used to be pronounced, and the gh in knight used to be pronounced like the ch in loch or the h in Ahmed.
In other cases, a silent letter was deliberately added to be more like the Latin word it evolved from. The word debt comes from the French *dette*, and used to be spelled dette in English too, but we started spelling it debt because in Latin it was *debitum*.
In addition to previous answers about letters originally being articulate or to mark etymology, one other cause is that there are more sounds in English than the Latin alphabet, so inevitably the leftover letters either have to have new letters created for them, or just use combinations of existing ones. When the language became standardized due to the printing press and education, extra letters dropped out of use.
For example, you know that “Ye Olde Shoppe” thing you always see in things? In addition to the final silent e’s which used to be pronounced, the phrase has another history hiding in there: the “Ye” is actually a simplification of “Þe” where “Þ” is capital thorn, the old letter used for what we now use the digraph “th” for.
The letter “Y” happened to look like a capital thorn to English speakers then, so that’s why it replaced it when things were getting simplified and standardized. Add one more change down the timeline, and you realize that the phrase is really “The Olde Shoppe.”
I can’t remember the exact history, but it’s related to a phenomenon in English called ‘The Great Vowel Shift’. As previous comments have said, words were pronounced phonetically, but the accent and tonal pronunciation of England changed rapidly over the space of around 200 years – making the phonetic spellings moot. Lots of spellings haveodernised since, but the silent letters have stuck around.
The weird and wonderful world of medieval linguistics
Edit: whoops: 200 years, not 20
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.
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).
“spell boscodictiasaur?” “Um.. B-O-S..” “no I’m sorry, it starts with a silent M!
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.
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.
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