Why does the English language have so many words where one or more letters are silent. For example why couldn’t “Knife” be simply written as nife or whatever combination of letters that make pronunciation obvious.
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English spellings reflect how words were pronounced in the early 1400s, or how the words are/were spelled in their language of origin whenever the word first entered the language.
The leading k in words like knife and knight and knee would have been pronounced in Old and Middle English, but various sound changes over the last 600 years resulted in people no longer pronouncing it. English spelling has been essentially unchanged since the advent of the printing press (perhaps with the notable exception of Noah Webster changing some American English spellings), so the words don’t look like how you might expect them to today.
English language questions always have the same answer:
English is old germanic and middle French put in a blender.
So you get a lot of drifting spelling and pronunciation.
Knights used to be germanic knechts, with a hard K. Over 1000 years the k sound got lost.
Knife followed the same trajectory. It was once pronounced with a hard K but has long since lost its edge.
This is part of the reasons why US English uses color instead of colour and apparently there have been many attempts to reform spelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform
I highly recommend “The history of the English Language podcast”. You can find it on iTunes or Spotify, or here: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
It’s extremely detailed and shows how and why the language morphed over the years and tells of important historical events that influenced the language. I listen to it when I go for walks. It’s very relaxing as well. There’s about 170 episodes, and each one is about an hour. Have fun!
There’s a great line from a made-for-tv movie about Walter Winchell:
“English is a bastard, with too many illegitimate parents. From the Romans, to the Celts, to the Anglos, to the Saxons, to the Normans, to the Puritans, to the Irish, to the Slavs, French, Jews, all the way to Walter Winchell. English is the biggest, ugliest bastard you’ll ever meet.”
The answer is the history of language. English is a trainwreck between older versions of German, Latin, French, Norse, and a few others. A smattering of Greek for good measure, and more than a few words we’ve picked up along the way from dozens of other languages.
And spelling is all over the place, having sourced from these languages or the people who first wrote down the translations for them over the course of 1500 years. Sounds evolve and shift from time to time but spellings tend to remain same or similar, which means that today we can look at spellings and (often) get a fair idea of which parent language the word came from and, sometimes, when it was adopted into English. A pretty neat silver lining on a very confusing cloud of mixups! This fact also helps explain why we have so many homonyms and homophones that are either unrelated or which have no obvious relationship (the answer being either complete coincidence or a common ancestor word that was routed two different ways through two different daughter-languages before being rejoined in English).
Many of the spellings were set when those letters were actually pronounced in the language. For example the word “knight” currently has 3 silent letters, but in middle English it was pronounced with a “k” sound at the beginning and a guttural sound before the t. All the words today that start with “kn” used to sound that way.
Some other words were originally spelled how they sounded, but scholars added in silent letters to show how the words were related to the older, foreign words from which they were derived. Since pretty much the only people who were writing anything back then were scholars, they set the standard, even if it didn’t make much sense. That’s why “debt” has a silent “b”.
Give a man a ghoti and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to ghoti and he’ll eat for the rest of his life.
“Ghoti” is pronounced:
– “gh” like “enough”
– “o” like “women”
– “ti” like “election”
The point is, English is weird, man.
Because the language contains within it the history of the words it uses. This is a cultural thing, many people (including me) think it is good to embody the history of the language in the language itself.
By the same token you could say, why do we have old buildings when we could knock them down and build new better organised ones? Why not get rid of all those curvy winding streets in our towns and replace them with nice straight ones?
Oh this is one where having to learn Middle English for my class on Chaucer comes in handy!
In Middle English (from the 11th to 15th century) the K sound **was** pronounced. So “Knife” was pronounced “K-neef.” “Knight” is another one, it was pronounced “K-neeht” in middle English.
The pronunciation of a lot of words have changed over time but written English often didn’t change to reflect the new ways words were being pronounced. So English spellings retained some weird leftovers like that.
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