SILENT LETTERS: I see you, but I can't hear you

Here is the podcast version of this article: Podcast version of "Silent Letters"

Why don't we pronounce the B in debt and doubt, the P in psychology and psalm, the GH in night and dough, the S in island and viscount, the K in knife and knee, the L in talk and colonel, the E in time and pirate, and so on?

The answer is complicated, but let's see if we can simplify it a bit. In very old forms of English, many of these letters were actually pronounced. For instance, Chaucer wrote about a gentle knight (or soldier) in his Canterbury Tales, but he would have pronounced it as a gent-luh kuh-nikt. But over time, thanks to varying speech patterns in isolated parts of England, the sound changed -- and a spelling change would have soon followed except for the invention of the printing press, which froze the old ways in place. Centuries before the invention of radio and television, there was no uniform source of pronunciation; you heard what was common in your immediate surroundings, and that might have differed quite a bit if you had moved only a few hundred miles away.

Another reason is that English borrowed many words from other languages that already had silent letters built into their pronunciation, and felt obliged to save the original spelling, too. Words borrowed from French are a good example. For instance, the word queue, meaning a line of people waiting in line for something, is spelled q-u-e-u-e. The letter Q all by itself would spell the sound, but we keep the original spelling with an added u-e-u-e. Someone once wrote that English doesn't just politely borrow words; it goes out, clubs other languages over the head, and drags their unconscious remains into our word collection. It isn't always a neat and rational process, and it means that we have thousands of words with silent letters that serve no purpose.

A third reason is that in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a group of influential British snobs decided that the English language had deteriorated to such a degree that drastic measures had to be taken to revive it. Since many of them were classically trained, they used Latin as their model for correct spelling and grammar. And so we had a reverse procedure: instead of effectively taking letters out of words by making them silent, these grammar gurus put letters back in based on Latin models. The English word dette (something you owe) became debt to acknowledge its source (the Latin debitum), and samoun (the fish) was changed to salmon to honor the Latin salmo.

So how do we handle this? I'm afraid that there is no easy way. There are some so-called rules based on common patterns, but there are just as many words that don't follow the rules. So we have to do a lot of memorizing to connect what we hear to what we see. And we just have to rely heavily on dictionary use when there is any doubt. (Whoops -- a silent B!)