Why do many words have silent letters when even without them the word would sound the same, like ‘island’ and many others.

Question

I tried asking my English teacher back in school but even she did not have an answer.

In: 157

Answer 1

Spoken language changes over time. That is a universal constant. People speak differently than their parents, and their children will speak differently from them. The same can’t be said about written language. The more written language is used, the more static it tends to be. It holds on to a ton of history because of that.

Take your “island” example. The ‘s’ was added due to people conflating the word with the word “Isle”. Since they sounded similar, and meant similar things, people began spelling them the same.

But “isle” also doesn’t have ‘s’ as pronounced. Why? Because it’s a loan word from Old French, and French evolved from the Latin language. The Latin word for island was “insula”, and the ‘s’ was indeed pronounced.

As Latin evolved into French, they stopped pronouncing the ‘s’. But for a short while, they still had it in spelling. That was when English borrowed the word “isle”. Then French started using short hand in the form of a circumflex to mark an unpronounced ‘s’; “île”

In otherwords, English has an ‘s’ in “island”, because French used to have an unpronounced ‘s’ in their word for island, because they used to pronounce their word for island with an ‘s’, but stopped… I think I’ve made this sound more convoluted than cool. LANGUAGE CHANGE IS COOL, I PROMISE!!!