Was not to sure on this and a quick check of Wikipedia yields this:
Not all silent letters are completely redundant:
* Silent letters can distinguish between homophones, e.g. in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already familiar with both words.
* Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word, e.g. vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would.
* The final ?fe? in giraffe gives a clue to the second-syllable stress, where *giraf might suggest initial-stress.
Silent letters arise in several ways:
* Pronunciation changes occurring without a spelling change. The digraph ?gh? was pronounced [x] in Old English in such words as light.
* Sound distinctions from foreign languages may be lost, as with the distinction between smooth rho (ρ
and roughly aspirated rho (ῥ
in Ancient Greek, represented by ?r? and ?rh? in Latin, but merged to the same [r] in English. Similarly with ?f? / ?ph?, the latter from Greek phi.
* Clusters of consonants may be simplified, producing silent letters e.g. silent ?th? in asthma, silent ?t? in Christmas. Similarly with alien clusters such as Greek initial ?ps? in psychology and ?mn? in mnemonic.
* Occasionally, spurious letters are consciously inserted in spelling. The ?b? in debt and doubt was inserted to reflect Latin cognates like debit and dubitable.
smearyllama said:
Well, back in the 40s, during World War II, there were ink rations, so you only got so much ink for typewriters, pens, etc.
The catch was, that if you used less ink than you were given, you were given less the next time.
To use more ink and get more every week, there was a secret meeting wherein English-speaking citizens banded together to alter the language with silent letters and such (also adding a lot of words that didn't exist pre-1940), and thus, modern English was born!
I like this guys way of thinking!
