Psilent Letters

Ateka Gomaa

It's kind of awkward when you're trying to look clever by using a long word only to get some other person to tell you that actually you missed the silent 'h' in 'silhouette' and you think 'well it's a silent letter, who cares about it anyway?'

The intentions of scholars who introduced many irregular spellings was to show the etymology of words. So they added some silent bs and gs to some words such as 'doubt' and 'reign' and everyone knew that these words were  borrowed from Latin, and their mission was complete. And nowadays when Latin has become an unknown language, that brilliant plan to clarify the etymology by confusing the orthography seems to have backfired and has resulted in many spelling mistakes and irritated people who don't see the point of a silent 'b' in debt because they don't speak Latin.

Then came a plan to simplify spelling. Silent letters were added to words that had the same sounds as words with them. For example 'gh' was added to words such as 'delight' because they rhymed with words such as 'night' which originally had a silent 'gh'.

Some irregular spellings were introduced to show the differences between homophones. It may look like other attempt to mess with the already chaotic (or should that be caotic) English spelling system, and in some ways it is and in others it's not.  It may be a lot easier to fully understand a text when you can distinguish between the homophones visually considering they would sound identical when spoken. Then again even if a word was misspelt most of the time you would probably be able to tell what was being said.

For example:

The knight rode through the night.

If this was written as:

The night road threw the knight,

 You would be reading about some nobleman being hurled about in the darkness, though if you had heard the sentence you would probably have understood the meaning.

Some words show etymology without even meaning to. Their orthography once reflected the phonetics. 'K' in words like or 'knee' and 'gh' such as in 'daughter' (pronounced similarly to ch in loch with a Scottish accent) were pronounced centuries ago. Yet over time these sounds became silent and the language became softer and resembled the way we speak now, however the spelling remained unchanged.

 Or after Britain was invaded by the French, changes to Old English appeared due to French influences. The 'qu' was introduced, replacing 'cw' (for example 'cwen' to 'queen') amongst other changes also introduced; thus showing us that these words were of English origin, influenced by French.

So it seems that silent letters didn't mean to cause all that confusion or embarrassment when you were corrected because you missed them out. Some of them were forced into our words without even needing to be there whilst others were once 'normal' letters too.

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