Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
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
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