In the English language why is there silent letters and why do you use them ?

Question

if a letter dose not make a sound in a word why is the letter in the word to start with

Answer 1

I believe you are referring to American-English. The whole language started out because the founding fathers of the United States wanted to be different from Great Britain. They decide to change the entire language to the language that other countries call slang English.

This is the exact reasons stated by learnenglish.org....

Old English was 90% phonemic (words sound the same as they look). But from the beginning of the 15th century, we began to borrow words from other languages. Because grammar and usage rules are different in other languages, adopted words did not follow the rules of English pronunciation.

The English language 'borrowed' the Latin alphabet, and so we have only got 26 letters to represent around 41 different significant sounds. This means that we must attempt to use combinations of letters to represent sounds.

In the Middle English Period William Caxton brought the printing press to England. As time passed, pronunciation continued to change, but the printing press preserved the old spelling. That's why today we have words that end in a silent 'e', or have other silent letters in the middle, like 'might'. In fact, modern day English is only 40% phonemic.

So are there any rules and can they help us? Axel Wijk (Regularized English, 1959, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksells) came up with over 100 rules for English spelling. It is claimed that by using these rules, you can spell up to 85% of the words in English with 90% accuracy. But is this really helpful? Basically, no! It gets so complicated that a much easier approach is to memorize sight words.

So you can see that unfortunately there is no clear way to know about all the silent letters in English. But is it a hopeless case? Well, the best we can do is to offer the following list of some silent letters:

Mb at the end of a word (silent b), e.g. comb, lamb, climb.
Sc at the beginning of a word followed by 'e' or 'i', (silent c), e.g. scene, scent, science, scissors (except for the word 'sceptic' and its derivations!).
Kn (silent k), e.g. knife, knock, know.
Mn at the end of a word (silent n), e.g. damn, autumn, column
Ps at the beginning of a word (silent p), e.g. psalm, psychiatry, psychology
Ght (silent gh), e.g. night, ought, taught
Gn at the beginning of a word (silent g), e.g. gnome, gnaw, gnu
Bt (silent b), e.g. debt, doubtful, subtle (but not in some words, e.g. 'obtain', 'unobtrusive'!)
The letter H is silent in the following situations:

At the end of word preceded by a vowel, e.g. cheetah, Sarah, messiah;
Between two vowels, e.g. annihilate, vehement, vehicle
After the letter 'r', e.g. rhyme, rhubarb, rhythm
After the letters 'ex', e.g. exhausting, exhibition, exhort.

Answer 2

Good question; I'll be sure to give it a star!

English is a tricky one and it's been slippery since the start. If you look at 'Olde English' and things written years ago, you see all kinds of imaginative spellings of words!

Eventually there came to be a standard of written English, decided upon by whatever consortium got busy and wrote a newer, bigger, better dictionary.

However, new people are still coming up with new ideas for English. In text messaging in particular, all kinds of short-cuts are taken while writing English words. It happens in Instant Messaging too, though if a person can type at a decent speed they shouldn't give in to the text type words. Those words are too open to misunderstandings, for they're a work in progress and have yet to be accepted as proper English.

Oh, and about the silent letters...I decided years ago that they help us differentiate words and pronounce words, so they are good guys.

Answer 3

It's not just American English. A lot of English words came from German or Anglo Saxon such as knight, naught, and many others. In Old and Middle English, the letters were pronounced, so knight was pronounced k-ni-gh-t with all the letters being pronounced. The words were very hard to pronounce, and eventually it got to where people were not pronouncing all of the letters, thus making the language easier to speak.

Answer 4

Im gonna keep it simple and to the point.

In short English is kind of a mess. Over the history and development of our language, it has had many other languages influence it. French (Latin) in particular. And when we were writing these words for the first time we took the other countries spelling for it. Now another country may have a different way of interperating those sounds so when they write it, it sounds phonetically correct, but when we see it we may have to think about it.

if you want theres a great article here

http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vangogh/555/Spell/trublspl1.html

Answer 5

Because English is not a phonetic language... it differs from the Romance languages such as Italian that are spelled just like they are pronounced, this came about because originally prior to the dictionary everyone spelled words the way they felt like... when Meriam Webster wrote the dictionary, that is when everyone came into agreement on how to spell words.

Answer 6

the english language is influenced by many other different languages that pronounce their words in all different ways. this is why some of our words sound funny and are spelled weird.

Answer 7

If language never changed --or if we could all sit down at once and establish all the "rules"-- many things might be more consistent. But that only works if you invent your own language from scratch. REAL living languages are impossible to control in this way -- and the more complicated the history and varied the speakers the more "inconsistent" that living language is likely to become.

Anyway, here are a number of factors that help to explain the ways many of the "silent letters" of English BECAME silent:

1) First note that, for the most part, the "silent letters" in Modern English words at one time were NOT silent.

2) Many of the spellings of Modern English began to be established at the time of the invention of the printing press. But it just so happened that English was then entering a time of rapid CHANGE, including in pronunciation of many words. (The most famous piece of this was the "Great Vowel Shift". The precise reasons for many of these changes are much discussed. One factor appears to be great movements in the population --and so one dialect affecting another-- perhaps as a result of the Black Plague.)

3) On a few of the specific changes
- Old English and early Middle English nouns had GENDER and CASE endings (the latter to mark the function of a noun in a sentence, as subject, object, etc), but this whole system eventually died out, in part by the influence of one dialect of English on another

One residue of these case endings is final e in various forms, which ended up pronounced as an unaccented -e (something like "uh"), then was lost completely. This is a source of the "silent e" in "place", "hole", "mile", etc. So why was this e kept in spelling? Mainly because it ended up serving ANOTHER useful purpose --of marking the preceding vowel as "long" (Look at German, and you'll see that many of these final e's are still used as part of their gender and case system, and are pronounced.)

- changes in vowel sounds and where a word is accented may end up making some sounds more difficult to pronounce. "Knight" (much like German "Knecht") was NOT difficult to pronounce in Middle English, but shifts, especially in the vowel sound, MADE some of its sounds more difficult to pronounce

Also, in some cases like this, the mixing of TWO cultures (here the Norman French and Germanic) may be a factor. Something "easy" in the Germanic language might be difficult for the French speakers, and vice versa (cf. how speakers of German find English /th/ difficult)

4) Another reason why spellings might not be changed after a letter became silent -- sometimes the letter became silent only in SOME forms of the word, but not in others. There was some value in keeping that letter in BOTH types, because this made it clear that the forms are related to each other.

Examples
- words like soft > soften, haste > hasten, fast > fasten, wrest > wrestle -- the added /n/ or /l/ caused the preceding f or s to become silent, but it was STILL pronounced in forms WITHOUT these endings.

-going the other way -- often a form WITH a suffix pronounces the letter, but when the suffix is dropped, it becomes difficult to pronounce the final sound, so it becomes silent. Consider how the "n" in damnation and autumnal becomes silent in "damn" and "autumn".

Note this point -- we are mistaken to think that writing systems (including spelling) are ONLY shaped to show how something is pronounced. How we write (and spell) words may ALSO provide information about what the word is DOING in the sentence, and what other words/forms it is related to.

5) Additional "pressure" for keeping a letter in the spelling of a word after it was lost in pronunciation -- to show what FOREIGN word it came from. (This, by the way, can STILL be helpful to show you the source/relative of a word we borrowed from Greek, for instance.) Thus, the p of "psalm" was originally pronounced in English as in the original Greek word was (and as it still is in German, etc). Consider too that the Latin or Greek connections of words was considered important to those most important in establishing spelling -- that is, scholars.

6) Keep in mind that many words are pronounced differently in different dialects of English. Note that, if every English dialect wrote things phonetically, the spellings of the same word could vary widely from one dialect to another -- and sometimes did. BUT it is more useful for English speakers of various dialects to communicate with one another if the variations are not so great. Thus a particular spelling from one dialect might become established (or "win out" from among competing spellings).

Now note again that after a particular dominant dialect group estalishes the spelling of a word, that word --or even which dialect IS the dominant one -- may change. So the "standard dialect" (e.g. "Received Pronunciation" in Britian, "Standard American English" in the U.S.) may end up with the spelling from one dialect and the pronunciation from another.

Also it may be that the "cultural elite" (upper social classes) establish "the correct SPELLING". BUT their PRONUNCIATION of the word may NOT "win out"/become dominant in spoken language.

Answer 8

to make the english language complicated....idk

Answer 9

Because our forefathers were pompous and wanted to distinquish their language.