A silent letter is left
unpronounced.
More than 60% of English words have
silent letters.
Silent letters are the ghosts of
pronunciations past.
They are borrowed words from
other languages.
They change the pronunciation of
another syllable e.g. 'fat'/'fate', 'hat'/'hate', 'don'/'done'.
when the printing press came to
England, many of the printers were Flemish and German. They added in a little
something extra to make the words look more like the way they'd pronounce them
back home.
16th century academics messed
around with spelling by wanting to make it more Latin and so added letters
to words like debt, doubt and island.
That -gh- letter pattern is from
the Anglo- Saxons - daughter, night, cough, dough, bright... the -gh- used to
be -h- and pronounced like the Scottish loch, a hard sound - until the French
invaded and added the g. Then the -gh- became silent or pronounced with a 'f'
sound.
Knife, knock, know, gnat, gnaw are
all Viking words which used to be pronounced but the letters are left in there
to see the origin and history of the word (in Sweden they still say the silent
letter in knife kneefe)
