I tried asking my English teacher back in school but even she did not have an answer.
In: 157
Spoken language changes much faster than written language. For many words, when the written form of the word was first established they *did* pronounce those letters. Language has simply adopted a different pronunciation over the last few hundred years.
Some letters were added in English in an attempt to bring the spelling closer to Latin, which was the language of educated people. Because of this S was inserted in “island”, and B was added to “debt”.
There are a few reasons.
1. English is a collection of words borrowed from, or inspired by, many other languages, so many of our words are spelled in a way that makes more sense in a different language.
2. Standardized spelling is actually rather recent, so for a long time, people just spelled words however made sense to them, and eventually, some of those spellings became the standard.
3. In some cases, we *did* at one time pronounce those letters, but the way we speak evolves a lot faster than how we spell.
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Unlike French, German and Dutch, the English language doesn’t have the history of language reform.
In the early 20th century a lot of language reform was done in the Netherlands to simplify the language and reduce the number of ways a word pronounced should be written (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschiedenis_van_de_Nederlandse_spelling#Spelling-Marchant and further).
In the 1996 the German language was made more consistent (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duitse_spellingwijziging_van_1996) and in France the Académie française takes care of it (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise)
For English, things were proposed many times but never really implemented (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform: English is the only one of the top ten major languages with no associated worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes. )
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!!!
The same reason you wrote out the a word with a silent letter sounds the same when that already means what a silent letter is in the first place
A few reasons. One is that most spellings in common words in English became largely fixed during the Middle English period, and in the transition between middle and modern English the way the language was spoken changed significantly. Letters that were pronounced in Middle English fell silent in Modern English, or changed significantly the way they are pronounced.
For example “knife” was actually pronounced with the k and the e sounded when the spelling was fixed, but then people stopped pronouncing those.
Another is words entering English from a non-English source retaining the spelling of the source language even though the normal way English words are spelled would imply a different spelling.
For example, “cassette” has the extra te on the end because that’s how French is written, even though an English word “casset” would have the same pronunciation
In a few cases, words that came from a non-English root (or were believed to come from one) had spellings deliberately changed by scholars who wanted to the spelling to reflect the source (or perceived source) of the word.
For example “debt” was spelled “dette” or “dett” in Middle English, but scholars recognised it was related to debitim in Latin, so added the pointless b into it. This particular method is how the s in “island” came to be.
Because English failed at language reform. In my language, every letter is only read in one way, and every sound made only corresponds to a single letter. It makes it so easy and intuitive. While in English, the words remain to be spelled the same way as centuries ago, despite the way they are spoken has changed a lot. This lead to the same letter being pronounced differently in other words, or even parts of the same word. Every C in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. Why? It absolutely makes no sense. Even if English language cannot reform its vowels, at least it should standardize its consonants. There is absolutely no benefit to learning how to spell a word that is pronounced totally different, it feels like I’m learning two languages at the same time, instead of one
As French silent letters and combination of letters to create a different is part of our daily life.
As exemple the sounds O can be written o, au, aux, eau, eaux and haut ( I may have missed others).
H is completly silent unless there is a C in front, then you prononce it Shh, the word chateau is pronounced shato
And if its a P in front then its pronounced F, phénomène is pronounced Fénomène, its the same meaning as in english
We got plenty of similar situations, It could be simplier but it would ruin the culture around French (thats just my take)
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