Silent letters

Silent letters - a staple of the English language and many other languages worldwide. These letters can be used to distinguish homophones such as “inn” vs. “in” or “to” vs. “too.” Other silent letters can affect the sounds of other letters in the word. For example, the e in “fine” makes the i be pronounced as a long vowel sound. Yet, not every language has these silent letters. Many Indian languages, such as Hindi and Telugu, are spelled exactly as they sound - making spelling easy. Often, kids are told to “sound things out” when learning spellings. This is useful for words like cat or bar, but what about words like “pterodactyl” or “wrap,” which use silent letters? There is no rule for those words, forcing English speakers to memorize spellings for most words.

So why did this happen? The leading cause is due to the way English was developed. The language grew by adapting words from various other European languages and, therefore, adopted the spellings from these languages. However, it wasn’t always like this. Early versions of Anglo-Saxon English didn’t have an official spelling - instead, people just spelled words how they thought they sounded. This meant that every letter was pronounced. It was only once dictionaries became standard after the printing press's creation that a standardized spelling was created.

This all begs the question—are silent letters worth it? Should there have been a more conscious effort to change the spellings of words to be more suited to English speakers and ensure that every letter could be pronounced?