Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
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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