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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize that the silent "k" in knife and knight were ever pronounced. Or the "p" in pterodactyl. I'm glad those three aren't making a comeback. :)

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knife and knight will have been pronounced with the 'k' originally in english; you can see this in Chaucer. Pterodactyl, being essentially coined by english speakers from classical greek roots, probably never had the 'p' pronounced in english, but it was certainly pronounced in greek.

However, the closest thing I'm aware of to a word "starting out with a silent letter" is debt, which was originally spelled (and pronounced) without the 'b'. The 'b' was added by someone who felt the word should better reflect the latin 'debeo', and was never pronounced at any point.

"Doubt" is another one; borrowed from old French doute in the 13th century, with the "b" added by scribes in the 14th century.

There's a bit in Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ where the pedant Holofernes is ranting about how the "b" should be pronounced in those two words, but as you say, it was always silent.

EDIT: Turns out "salmon" and "solder" were originally "saumon" and "soudor", with the "l" added in the 18th century (agsin to reflect the Latin spelling)

I very much enjoyed this quick introduction to Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation (the sound of speech at the time) and how many puns and much interpretation is lost in modern accents. From the Open University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

Well remembered. Also "island", the "s" in there is false etymology by trying to relate it to Latin "insula" (my dictionary says it's to relate it to "isle" so take what I say with a grain of salt!); the actual word is "i(eg)land", no "s" to be found.

I actually like the fact that English words are spelt more closely to their meaning (/etymology) than pronunciation, since pronunciation shifts. In that way words like debt/debit form semantic clusters (as in the structure of Arabic) even though the former has a silent 'b'. It makes the prosaic language more poetic.

Of course French elevated this spelling conservativism to a fetish, proving that you can go to far.

But I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings. Likewise teaching English reading via "phonics" ignores the interconnection of the words and makes spelling harder rather than easier.

> Of course French elevated this spelling conservativism to a fetish, proving that you can go to[o] far.

A funny way to respond to English inserting a spurious 'b' into the French dette / dete.

> I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings

(my emphasis)

This is overstated to the point of complete absurdity. You are always forced to memorize the meanings of words; that's the difference between words and sentences. To a great extent, if you don't have to memorize the meaning, it's not a word. (There are word-level syntax bits, such as arguably the re- prefix to verbs, but really the fact that the meaning is arbitrary is the essence of a word.)

I don't know about that, I think to a great deal it is possible to guess through context and the word what a word means. The number of neologisms produced everyday on reddit must be huge but it doesn't present a problem.

To a first (and second, really) approximation, you learn 100% of your vocabulary from context. So? I don't see how that's related to anything I said.

I was thinking about those "kn" words a few months ago and sat down with a dictionary to see how many there were. I think there were about 20 or so common ones, and every single one has a cognate in Swedish that starts with an audible k, and same for words like gnat. I wonder why English has dropped that sound. Are there exceptions?

Knight's origin in Modern English is the Old English "cniht" [1]. The 'c' was pronounced back then. Similarly, knife comes from Old English "cnif" [2]. It was satisfying, when I took a random Old English course about a decade ago, to find that my deliberate mispronunciations (mostly to annoy the pedants in my social circle) actually had a basis in reality and not just a Monty Python sketch.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cniht

[2] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cnif

English spelling is a product of how people used to pronounce words. So whenever you see "silent letters" it usually means they were pronounced before (although you still need supporting evidence).

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