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Feb 11, 2013

This week's theme
Words with initial silent letters

This week's words
pteridology
knacker
gnathic
wraith
chthonic

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Well, this week's words do their part by carrying silent letters in their spellings.

Seriously, why in the world would we have silent letters? To make sure English orthography is not too easy? Who knows what might happen if everyone learned the language effortlessly?

Why? Well, it's a long story. A story as long as the history of the English language. Ultimately, the English spelling is a reflection of thousands of years of hodge-podge that brought it where it is today. And a reflection of humankind and its sometimes illogical ways.

Some letters that are quiet now were not as shy to speak up in the past. Their sounds just fell off over time. For example, the letter k in the word knee was pronounced in the beginning, but English speakers dropped the initial k (and g) sound in a word when followed by the letter n. In German they still pronounce it -- their word for knee, Knie, is pronounced with the k sound, for example.

Some words were deliberately manipulated. The letter b was inserted into the word debt (in Middle English it was det) to show its classical ancestry -- because Latin debit had a b. But we continued with the same pronunciation.

The word island has a sad story. We added the letter s to iland (literally, watery land) because we erroneously believed it was derived from French isle. The French word has dropped its s to become île, but we are still carrying that misbegotten s.

The word psychology, which we got from Greek has its p pronounced in Greek. We don't have the initial ps or pt combinations in English so we ignore the p sound.

At other times we were not very consistent. We borrowed many words from French that have their initial h silent. We continue with the word hour, while we have added the h sound in other words, such as human and hospital.

And so it goes.

This week we'll feature five words with initial silent letters. As a bonus, the last word of this week has its first two initial letters silent. Let's not be too hard on these silent letters -- they are not as deadweight as they seem. If nothing else, they help us get a higher score in Scrabble.

pteridology

(ter-i-DOL-uh-jee)