However, silent ⟨k⟩ and ⟨g⟩ occur because of apheresis, the dropping of the initial sound of a word. These sounds used to be pronounced in Old and Middle English.
The silent K: You need to know
The 'k' in English is traditionally a hard-sounding vowel 'cah' or 'kah', especially when it's at the end of a word: back, for instance. However, when the letter 'k' precedes the letter 'n' at the start of a word, it falls silent; such as 'know'.
Like many silent letters, the K was not always silent. In Old English, the word knight was once cniht and knot was once cnotta, and the K sound at the beginning used to be pronounced, up until about the 17th century.
171: The silent l in the word 'salmon' — Pronuncian: American English Pronunciation.
Silent letters are letters that don't correlate with any sound when a particular word is spoken. There are silent vowels and silent consonants. Silent letters can help differentiate homophones (words that sound the same but have different spellings). Some silent letters give insight into the origin of a word.
Introduction. Tell students that today you will be talking about silent letters. Explain that silent letters are letters that are spelled but are not pronounced. These letters can come at the beginning, middle, and end of words.
The n sound is make by putting the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth. The combination means the tongue is pretty busy if you say k-nife or k-night, and it's easier to drop the k sound.
As The Independent nicely says it, "Silent Letters are the ghosts of pronunciations past." Older versions of these words had pronounced Ns. Most of them come to English from Latin. For example autumn comes from the Latin autumnus and column comes from the Latin columna. In these words, the N was pronounced.
It originated in the Phoenician consonant kap, which was adopted as kappa for GREEK. It reached the Romans via the Etruscans, but was little used in LATIN, in which C and Q were preferred as symbols for the voiceless velar stop /k/.
Back to the question of why English doesn't have diacritical marks. The answer, according to wordgenius.com, is likely related to the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. Early printers decided not to include the marks in many places, so they were dropped as spelling and pronunciation became more standardized.
If an “L” is found towards the end of the word, before the letters “f,” “v”, “k” and “m,” but after the letter “a,” then it's usually silent (behalf, calve, walk, almond). In many of these instances, the silent L lengthens the previous vowel sound, which gives the slight impression of the “L” /l/ sound.
Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature.
F. While some people do in fact pronounce the second f in fifth, the first pronunciation given in our dictionary is the one that omits it. Overall, however, f is to be commended for its performance generally.
And why don't we pronounce it? As it turns out, Wednesday actually has Germanic linguistic origins. It is derived from the Old English word, Wōdnesdæg, which honors the Germanic god Wodan.
Silent letters may seem useless but –believe it or not– they are not always redundant. They may help us in different ways: ? Homophones.
However, during the 15th century, many words from other languages, such as Latin and French, were added to the English language. Often these new words didn't follow English rules of grammar. Since their spellings were fixed, some letters became silent when pronounced in English.
In the word, 'scissors', the 'c' is silent. You don't get to hear the pronunciation of the 'letter c'.
In the word 'sandwich', if you looked that up in the dictionary, you WOULD see the D sound. But it's actually never pronounced that way. So Wednesday, Handsome: the dictionary says no D. But 'Sandwich', the dictionary does say D but it hasn't caught up with the actual habits of how we speak.
For example in the word 'sword', you don't pronounce the letter 'w'. And the letter 'h' is silent in the word 'ghost'. There are lots more examples of words with silent letters in English.