Why are silent letters a thing?
In: Culture
In some cases they may seem silent, but slightly alter the phenome. My last name starts with dze, and it makes the sound of a d while your mouth is in the shape for a z. My name is weird
Linguistics and the development of human language can basically be booked down to “why waste time say lot sound when few sound do trick”
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
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.
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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