Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
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.
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