I've enjoyed reading your comments for a rather lengthy period of time. For this reason, I have at last, scrunched-up enough courage to ask a question. Is there any chance someone can explain to me, why "indicted" is pronounced: "in-die-ted" and by extension, we also have "indictment"?

Why the silent "c"?

Thank you in advance!

Signed:

---Baffled in Bermuda

and yet we have interdict, with the c sounded.

Good question.

What are silent letters for? Seeing as a letter is "a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech", the term "silent letter" is oxymoronic. Is a silent letter just the vestige of a former pronunciation, a kind of orthographical appendix?

Edit: This Wiki article sheds some light on your question.

Good question. Like many that have anything to do with English orthography, the answer is not a simple one. The word came into Middle English from Norman French sometime after 1066. It was spelled enditen, and the vowels were all sounded as in Italian or Spanish. Somewhere between 1066 and the 1500s, there was a movement in Parisian French towards spellings that indicated the Latin etymology of words. That's were the silent b in debt comes from, (cf. the too-often pronounced t in often). Sometimes they got the etymology incorrect, as in admiral, sometimes correct as in perfect (originally borrowed as parfit) or adventure (aventure).

And note that sometimes the intrusive consonant is pronounced in the "correct" pronunciation. Another example of an incorrectly etymologized intrusive consonant is the s in island. We're lucky they didn't go farther back with the bad etymology and decide it should be spelled insland.