Silent Letters in English: A History

It’s time to take a look at one of the most difficult problems foranyone learning English – silent letters. There are so many of them throughoutthe language that it’s hard to imagine having a conversation withoutencountering at least one. In fact, there were two in that last sentence, the G in throughout and two silent Es.

G is a consonant, and we have more silent consonants than vowels,but the most common silent letter in English is the most commonly found letter– E. There is a popular, though inconsistent, rule regarding the silent E –Silent Es at the end of a word make the previous vowel long. Think of the wordage, for example. The final E, which is silent, serves to tell you that age ispronounced with a long A. This holds true for words like cone, make, or like. However, this rule does not explain words likegarage or imagine.

In fact, the silent E would have been pronounced in Old English and in much of Middle English before around 1200. The word linewould have had two syllables and would have been pronounced lin’-uh. Butconversational English changed beginning with the French invasion of Britain byWilliam the Conqueror in 1066. French pronunciation crept into English andmoved from south to north. This was the period of Middle English, the languageof Geoffrey Chaucer and his The Canterbury Tales, which was spelled phonetically,according to how it sounded rather than through a formalized spelling systemlike the one we use today.

With the arrival of the 15th and 16th centuries, however,education was more widespread and spelling really needed to be more structured.Thus began what we call The Great Vowel Shift. Dialects and pronunciationhad been confusing. English slowly, over the course of about two hundred years,standardized its orthography – the spelling, pronunciation, manners of emphasisand stress, and punctuation of the language. This also resulted in theelimination of many features of Old and Middle English, including many simplewords having two syllables.

We used to have many consonant clusters, words with two or even moreconsonants together to create a different sound. There could be as many as 500of these clusters in English but, today, we only have about 401. The KN cluster, forexample, gives us knife, know, and knock. These words used to have twosyllables, because the K was pronounced. Scholars and educators of the timeeliminated this practice.

I guess that this was seen as a way to simplify English and to wipeaway the ghosts of the past. Now English would not be Saxon or Norman, orFrench, Germanic, or Latin. It would be a separate, unique language. And, wehave to admit, is at least very unique!

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