Why are there silent letters in English words? - Big Questions - (Ep. 42) | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm Craig

The P is silent. And this is Mental Floss on YouTube. Today I'm going to answer Morgana7544's big question, why are there silent letters

in English words? Well, 7544, can I call you that? Around 60% of English words contain a silent letter

Today I'm going to tell you why. Let's get started. So there's a couple of reasons why letters might be silent

Edward Carney, who wrote a survey of English spelling, made this a little less confusing

by dividing silent letters into two groups, auxiliary and dummy. Auxiliary letters are the ones that you combine with another letter to make a unique sound

Auxiliary letters fall into two subcategories, exocentric and endocentric. Exocentric is when the sound isn't like the sound of either of the letters, like the N-G

in king or the T-H in then. It's not king or ten

Endocentric is when the sound is the same as one of its letters, like in double consonants, in the two Ms in roommate, or the silent Es, as in the E at the end of maid

And then there are dummy letters. This is when the silent letter is really stupid. No, it's unrelated to the letters around it and doesn't impact pronunciation

These also fall into two subcategories, inert letters and empty letters. Inert letters are part of a word segment and might not be silent in certain variations

of the word. For instance the G in resign is silent but isn silent in resignation Empty letters are never pronounced like the S in is Oh it pronounced island So now you know how to categorize silent letters but the question remains why do we have them Well they emerged in the English language for a few different reasons

Often, especially in the case with auxiliary letters, the silent letters were originally pronounced

but pronunciation changed over time without a spelling change. For instance, in the Middle Ages, they pronounced both the K and the G-H in the word night

as in knigget. Really? That's amazing! Similarly, the silent W in words like wrath used to indicate that the word was pronounced differently

than words starting with R, but that different pronunciation disappeared over time

And for many dummy letters, we can blame our ancestors for being snobby and adding in silent

letters where they didn't previously exist. According to the Dictionary of Modern English

Grammar, quote, As the influence of the classical world was revived in the 15th century, scholars of English

desired to remind their readers that most of the words in the language originated in Latin and Greek. To show off their knowledge that doubt, then spelled doubt because it

came into medieval English via French dut, derived originally from Latin dubiter, they

added the B and it stuck. A consonant cluster is also developed over time. This is when a group of consonants is

bunched together but only contain one syllable, like the S-T-H in ASPHMA. This happens a lot

with words we borrow from other languages. For instance, the P-S in psychology comes from

the Greek language