Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
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.
“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.
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).
Though I couldn’t possibly give any grammatical or etymological reason for this, I think it’s cool how some seemingly extraneous and unnecessary silent letters are like “sleeper agents” which become “activated” when you add a suffix (and sometimes even a prefix).
Examples:
GN: sign — signal, signature; gnostic — agnostic
GM: paradigm — paradigmatic
MB: bomb — bombastic
MN: hymn — hymnal; damn — damnation
UI: fruit — fruition
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