Silent letters - Why is english so strange?

The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Silent letters
Why is english so strange?

Shhh! It’s time to talk about silent letters.

You know those pesky silent letters. They’re the ones that creep sneakily into words at the beginning, middle, or end when you’re not expecting them. Like the k in knife, the gh in night, or the b in comb. (Aaagh! What are you doing there, silent letters! You frightened me!)

Have a look at this sentence:

The handsome ghost wriggled through

the castle in half an hour.

Can you count how many silent letters there are? Eight? Or perhaps even more? Count them up for yourself. Come on, don’t be silent . . .

English is not the only language with silent letters, but it has more than most. In fact, about 60 percent of words in English have a silent letter in them. This can be really hard when you’re learning to spell, as you’ve probably realized already.

021

So why are those silent letters there? Well, it’s all because of the mixed-up history of the English language. Remember how English began in about the fifth century AD when people from Germany settled in Celtic-speaking England? And then those Latin-speaking Christian monks turned up, followed in the ninth century by Norse-speaking Vikings? And then finally William the Conqueror appeared in the eleventh century with his French-speaking friends and conquered them all? (Why couldn’t they all just stay quietly at home curled up sensibly by the fireside?)

Goodness. Celtic, German, Latin, Norse, and now French speakers, each with their own language, alphabet, and system of spelling—it’s a mystery how anybody understood each other! And actually, because William the Conqueror spoke French, for a while there French even became the official language of England. This is where quite a few of our silent letters crept in, from French words, where the h was not pronounced. For example, the silent h in hour comes from the French heure (pronounced, um, “er”). I bet you can think of a few others like that. (Can’t you? Honestly?)

Funnily enough, around this time people started putting letters into English words that weren’t even French in the first place, to make them look more French. That’s how the u was added to the original Latin word color—and it’s still spelled “colour” like this in many English-speaking countries. (Though not in the U.S.!) Then other people thought it would be good if English looked more like Latin, so a b, for example, was dumped back into the word doubt, even though it had been taken out because no one pronounced it that way anymore. And have you ever wondered about words like psalm and rhubarb? (Well, I have.) They came from ancient Greek words, which had ancient Greek letters, psi and rho. Oh, why couldn’t they just leave poor old English alone!

So that’s an explanation for some of our silent letters. Another important thing to know is that quite a few of today’s silent letters have not always been so quiet. The word knight, for example, used to be pronounced in English with the k and the gh sounded out (ke-nee-g-hht), as were many of the silent e’s and l’s. And the silent w in words like wreck or write was originally there to show a funny sort of Old English r sound that was different from the ordinary r. But over time the way people spoke English changed, even though the spelling didn’t.

And don’t forget The Great Vowel Shift . . .

The what?

This strange happening started during the fifteenth century. What it meant was that gradually people began to change the way they said their vowels (a, e, i, o, u)—the sounds shifted to a different part of their mouth. Up until The Great Vowel Shift, a word like met was pronounced more like our word mate,and goat was pronounced more like goot. (Try saying them out loud and you’ll see what I mean about your mouth.) Anyway, with these changes of pronunciation going on all over the place, letters in words appeared and disappeared as people wrote them down differently, and it all got even more confusing.

All right, you say, but this was hundreds of years ago. Why do we still use spellings based on how people used to speak?

Well, around the time of The Great Vowel Shift something truly extraordinary happened.

Are you ready . . . ?