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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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”.
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