Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
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.”
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