![]() As these words were read by many people, these conventions became the norm.Ī different example is the word ‘ice’. These printers often used Dutch spelling instead of English spellings if they were not sure of a word. For example, the first people to operate printers in the 1400s England were often from the Netherlands. ![]() Some people had the power to influence spelling and did so in a way that was not necessarily useful. So we took the spelling of the original word, but over time the initial consonant disappeared. ![]() However, for English speakers, sound combination of ‘ps’ of ‘kn’ is very strange. The same is true for ‘knife’ when it came into English. In Greek, the ‘p’ at the beginning of ‘psychologist’ was pronounced so it was something like ‘psychologist’. For example, ‘psychologist’ comes from Greek and ‘knife’ comes from Old Germanic. This means the pronunciation changed, but the spelling did not, and so some letters became redundant, or silent.Ī second reason for silent letters is that English has borrowed a lot of words from other languages. After the vowel shift, it was very difficult to change the spelling, because everyone already agreed on the old spelling. The reason this is important is that many words already had their spelling before the Great Vowel Shift. I have a link on my site that gives other examples of this. If you say the vowel for the original sound /iː/ and compare it to the new sound /aɪ/then you can notice that the place you produce it in your mouth moves towards the back. This means that today’s word ‘bite’ originally sounded like ‘beet’. And they changed in a similar way so that they all moved back in the mouth. ![]() Nobody knows why this happened, but the sounds of many vowels moved. From about the year 1400 until about 1700, there was a dramatic movement in the way English was spoken. The first reason is called the Great Vowel Shift. Ok, so there are four basic reasons why we have silent letters in English. There are also some videos and pictures and other links that show you what I am talking about. I have a transcript there that will help you understand some of the things I will be talking about. I am going to present a lot of information today, so it might be a good idea to head over to my site. Well, the thing is, these silent letters don’t just annoy learners of English as a second language, they also annoy kids who are learning to read and write English as their first language. ![]() You know, the way words like ‘know’ have a silent ‘k’ at the beginning? Other examples include the silent ‘b’ at the end of the word ‘bomb’, the silent ‘t’ in the middle of the word ‘listen’ and the silent ‘e’ at the end of words such as ‘kite’. All that, coming up after this short piece of music. Today, I will be looking at four reasons why we have silent letters. When I show my students the reasons, it often helps them accept it and start to work with it, instead of asking questions about it and struggling to understand why! It is a pain trying to deal with all the silent letters. Why on earth does English have so many silent letters? It makes both spelling and pronunciation more difficult than it needs to be. Today, we are going to talk about something that annoys a lot of my students when learning English. It will be irregular because I am not sure exactly when I will post them, but there are a few ideas on the way. This series is called ‘Reasons for English’ and I will look at some of the reasons why English is a bit strange or weird. Today I am going to start an irregular new series of podcasts. Hello everyone! My name’s Stephen and this is English with Stephen. ![]()
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