Riff-lections: Lexicon Subtleties: Silent letters

Blog entry #90

What are silent letters?

'e' in table is not pronounced. 'e' is the silent letter in table.

'h' is school is silent.

'k' in knee, 'l' in half, 'g' in sign, 'c' in indict are a few other examples.

Origin

Words borrowed into English from other languages:

'Tsunami’ borrowed from Japanese

'Psychology' borrowed from Greek

Before the Great Vowel Shift (see footnotes for reference), the Germanic language had open syllables with long vowels, meaning the word 'bit' would be said with short 'i' whereas the word 'bite' would be long and would have been something like 'beetuh'. After the GVS, the distinction between long and short vowels in English is more than just length. The eventual elision (omission of sound) of the final 'e' made its modern pronunciation 'byt' with the 'e' becoming silent.

Evolution

Most words beginning with a silent k are remnants of Old English, which was the language that evolved from the Saxons who settled in England around the 5th century. Historically, they were voiced and are still pronounced in modern German words. For example, the word ‘knot’ in English is knoten in German. Despite having the same origins, English lost the initial k sound while German still has it. The assumption is that English speaker simply chose to stop saying them.

Old English texts comprise several awkward consonant clusters that are difficult to pronounce. Even Shakespeare would have still pronounced the initial k, but shortly after that its use dwindled in modern times. The k and gh was lost quite recently, so the old spellings have stuck. Some of the earlier consonant clusters like 'h' prefixed in words like ‘ring’, originally spelt and voiced as 'hring', disappeared much earlier, resulting in the spelling to also change.

The word ‘knight’ has two consonant clusters and it’s a lot easier to pronounce as 'nyt' than the German equivalent 'knecht', where both clusters are voiced. In some cases, it’s useful to keep the initial k as it helps distinguish one word from another (e.g. ‘knot’ and ‘not’, ‘know’ and ‘now’).