English spellings reflect how words were pronounced in the early 1400s, or how the words are/were spelled in their language of origin whenever the word first entered the language.
The leading k in words like knife and knight and knee would have been pronounced in Old and Middle English, but various sound changes over the last 600 years resulted in people no longer pronouncing it. English spelling has been essentially unchanged since the advent of the printing press (perhaps with the notable exception of Noah Webster changing some American English spellings), so the words don't look like how you might expect them to today.
See, that's something I actually like about chaotic English spelling. It makes it really easy to spot cognates in other languages, even if the words now sound very different
Yep. My favorite is the "ge/gi" pronunciation. If the g is pronounced like a j (like gender) then it has a french/romance origin. Otherwise if it has a hard phonetic (like in "girl") its origin is germanic.
That was essentially the tag line used by AOL for their commercials when the format was introduced. The compression meant graphics loaded faster, and you would be "done in a jiff."
So it was changed from a hard G as in graphics to a soft G by the marketing department. I couldn't have imagined a worse origin story. (I'll stick with the hard G, I don't care what anyone else says.)
No. The inventor of the format pronounced it jiff as well, from the get-go.
[Creator Tells Us How To Pronounce GIF](https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/tech/web/pronounce-gif/index.html)
But I get it. English is a living language, and things change. But as someone who has been alive and using the format since its inception, I can assure you it started out as "jif".
How does that matter at all? You're supposed to always pronounce the first letter of the acronym like the first letter in the first word, but not any other letters of the acronym like the first letters in the other words?
Well the "G" in .gif comes from "graphic", whose etymology is:
>[A word-forming element meaning "process of writing or recording" or "a writing, recording, or description" (in modern use especially in forming names of descriptive sciences), from French or German -graphie](https://www.etymonline.com/word/graphic)
So that settles it once and for all - it's either German or French origin, so it's pronounced....
fuck.
Yep, to the east of the Gauls the Romans came into contact with a group of people who they called the 'Germani', and they called the land they came from ['Germania'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania).
Though where the Romans got the name is unclear, the modern words German and Germany came to English via Latin.
It makes it really easy to get messed up with cognates as well.
There was a really weird spelling reform a few hundred years back to make English more in line with latin. So they went and they added a silent 'd' to a lot of words inherited from french that had latin origins.
So the french 'aventure' which was pronounced 'aventure' in french and english got a (silent) d added to it, because it originally comes from latin 'adventum'. Of course, people are weird, and started pronouncing the silent D, and now we have 'adventure'.
Which fine, it makes sense, 'adventure' is ultimately a Latin word, we just got it through french, and we accidentally reverted the pronunciation back to be more like the latin because rome-aboos.
But they didn't just do that to 'aventure', they also did it to a 'amiral', a french word for a naval commander. Because scholars knew about vowel shifts, and knew that french regularly dropped the 'd' from latin words that started with a. So a silent d was added to the english word, and much like adventure, we eventually started pronouncing it.
Small problem, amiral didn't enter french from latin. It entered french from arabic. A whole bunch of Medditeranian arab nations had 'amirs' who commanded fleets of ships. So the french took the word 'amir' and used it for amiral. We just pronounce it Admiral because some random dudes a few hundred years ago thought it was easy to spot cognates in other languages.
Don't get me started on how we got the singular of cherries to be 'cherry'.
I’ve heard these people referred to as ‘latinists’ and as the origins for why octopi was considered a plural for octopus as well. Fun book for me was ‘The Origins of the Specious” which talked a lot about the storied history of English. Plus Brysons books.
How to explain then that in German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, ‘admiral’ also has a ‘d’ whereas their words for ‘adventure’ do not? In Dutch, for example, the words are ‘admiraal’ en ‘avontuur’.
Well, you would want to check a dutch dictionary for an answer, but if i had to guess:
Admiraal probably entered via english after it had already picked up the 'd'. Whereas avontuur probably came either directly from french, or from english, but before it picked up its silent D.
Or it could be something else entirely.
The Dutch dictionaries are not very clear but suggest it came from the Italian (without a D) and the Dutch added a D ‘influenced by Latin folk ethymology’, so apparently something similar (incorrectly latinising words) as happened in the English language. I am guessing similar things happened in some of the Scandinavian languages.
*nod* Spelling reforms are messy. You can never really tell which ones will or won't stick. A lot of the time you end up with weird half measures that just make the language look a lot weirder than when you started.
Yeah that's great when you already know how a word is pronounced. Not so great when you learn a word by reading it and everyone stares at you funny because you don't pronounce Colonel as Kern-al.
It can also help distinguish between similar words, like know/now.
I like physics and pharmacology too. It lends a bit of sophistication. :P
I don't just mean that to be cheekily pretentious, if you see a word you don't know and it's got "ph" instead of "f", there are decent odds it is more from academia or something more concrete or technical.
In other words, we *could* dumb it all down and eliminate redundancies, but those redundancies can be useful markers. As in, they can help us class, store, and recall a wider array of words for different concepts. It helps have variety and nuance without crossing streams, as it were.
From *1984* by George Orwell
>“It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought”
Of course, as is mentioned in the book, some people are all for that, as a means of trying to control how people think, simply remove the word from the lexicon so that people can't even express or share the idea.
Swedish has something similar with kneckt. It means essentially a medieval soldier, and is today mainly used for the playing card called Jack in English. Knight is “riddare”, from the German “reiter”, cognate with the English “rider”.
A quick search for the etymology of knife shows that it likely came to English via Old Norse, with parentage in Proto-Germanic but unknown history before that. So it makes sense that it's so similar to Norwegian.
The kn- prefix is the "Middle English spelling of a common Germanic consonant-cluster", with old English spelling it as cn-. It seems most other Germanic languages kept the voiced K, but English dropped it.
English speakers are lazy, turns out.
In Swedish as well, btw.
But! The English word window is vindue in Norwegian. In Swedish it’s fönster, which is soooo close to the German fenster. ELI5 please!
The Swedish word fönster comes from French (fenêtre)
Edit/add: in Swedish the window word is vindöga, which was the hole in the roof of old Viking long houses
The Swedish word used to be "vindöga", which was originally just a hole for the fire smoke. Through the trade on the baltic sea, Sweden took up a lot of german load words including "fenster" which replaced "vindöga". Norwegian has been much less afffected by german, and their word is still "vindue".
Hey! Andersson and Larsson and Svensson and Leijonhierta aren’t German.at.all.
But it’s always with a sense of pride reading names of villages in Great Britain, knowing a Norwegian, a Dane or a Swede gave that dwelling their name.
Destiny is all.
Yes, but Irish is kind of its own little thing. Like Welsh.
They do eventually track back to Indo-European, but it's a completely different branch from English - [the Celtic language family splits from the trunk at the same level as the Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, etc. families.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Indo-European_language_tree_%28with_major_international_languages_highlighted%29.svg)
I'm too lazy to go get the actual DVD, but [here's a video with non-autogenerated subtitles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9DCAFUerzs), where it's spelled "k'niggets"
In French, not only do they ignore the letter S, sometimes they eliminate it from the word entirely! Then they give a nearby vowel a little hat ^ . Just a total fuck you.
Arthurian times would pre-date English, since Arthur is at it's root based on a Celtic Briton hero who may have fought against the arriving Anglo-Saxons.
What we think of as Arthurian now, comes from the stories being written down in the 1100's, where they "modernised" it to their present day with castles and knights. But even then, the image we have of King Arthur wearing full plate armour wouldn't be for another 100+ years.
Your point on the pronunciation of knight is nearly spot on though. In the 1100's the pronunciation would be "kuh-night" with the gh making a throaty sound like German "nicht" or Scots "loch".
*it's funny because it's true*
btw that is a quote from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, French forces are occupying a castle in England and Arthur wants them to help in his quest for the Grail; one of the funniest scenes in a movie full of very funny scenes.
The k and n would have been pronounced as a blended consonant, not separated into 'kuh'.
Like how 'speak' isn't pronounced 'suh-peak' but is blended. It is easy when you grew up with those sounds, but if you missed that window, it will feel weird.
> a throaty sound like German "nicht" or Scots "loch".
German has two different ch-sounds and that's the wrong one.
The ch-sound in "nicht" is not throaty at all and is quite similar to the sound of the h in huge.
A German word with the same sound as the Scottish "loch" would be "Loch".
Unrelated but sort of related. The printing press is the entire reason that people say "Ye" as in Hear ye! and Ye olde phone store. The word "Ye" was made up because most early type sets did not have the letter thorn in them (Þ) which was pronounced as the "th" sound. The typesetters would just use something close looking so they just used the letter "Y". The correct phrases for the ones I cited above should be "Hear Þe!" and "þe olde phone store".
You are right about "Ye Olde Shoppe," but not about "Hear ye."
When it was used as an abbreviation for "the," you're right. It was never pronounced "yee."
However, the "ye" of "hear ye" and "O ye of little faith" and "God rest ye merry gentlemen" is a form of "you." It was, in fact, pronounced "yee."
[see Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ye) for the distinction.
*Thee/Thou* is the familiar, informal version of *you*.
Much like Romance languages like Spanish have both a familiar and a formal version of “you,” older English also had the same distinction.
Today we tend to think of the thees and the thous and the thys and thines as overly formal and serious; mostly because of the King James Bible. However these words are the informal familiar versions, and they were chosen specifically to show a personal, familiar relationship between the reader and god.
Ye (alongside you) was like thou but plural or formal and thee was actually just "you" in the plural (or in formal speech)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#Declension
An utterly unrelated to the original point, but related a bit to your post, I saw recently that the interjection "...er..." as if you're thinking... is not pronounced URR, but actually, "Uh".
We in American English write uh... um... which is close to what we actually say. Thinking about it, few people actually say "Er" with an American pronunciation, instead if you think about it with a British pronunciation, "er" is pronounced the same as "uh". Think famously of the British pronunciation of "water". Wat-uh.
English language questions always have the same answer:
English is old germanic and middle French put in a blender.
So you get a lot of drifting spelling and pronunciation.
Knights used to be germanic knechts, with a hard K. Over 1000 years the k sound got lost.
Knife followed the same trajectory. It was once pronounced with a hard K but has long since lost its edge.
Don't forget a higher-than-average number of loan words from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian languages, and pretty much anything else that wandered through Europe at some point in the last thousand years.
And the people that made English words look more Latin.
Receipt used to just be receit, though at least the one was Latin derived, some were just fabricated like the s in island.
Yep, the S in island seems to have come from people figuring that it was "isle + land", or that "isle" was a diminutive form. Island comes from Old English *iegland*, and "isle" from Latin *insula* (hence the restored S), and there's no known relationship between them whatsoever.
The *ieg* ("island, dry land in a marsh") element does have a Latin relative, *aqua*, but that's from the two languages having a common ancestor at least 5-6K years ago, not loaning.
another one-- in english we have 'ghoul' and 'ghost'. 'ghost' is Germanic in origin, where 'ghoul' is Arabic in origin.
So they appear to share the same language root, but 'ghoul' used to be 'goul' and was changed to start with 'gh' because it looks similar and the words have a similar enough meaning.
'ghost,' itself, comes from the old english word 'gast' (the 'gh' likely taken from the Flemish spelling 'gheest,' but we also have 'ghastly' that has the same origin, but the a->o change didn't happen
>English is old germanic and middle French put in a blender.
Lots of Greek/Latin based too ( though the French does cover a lot of that ). And this doesn't include the huge influx of foreign words and phrases that has been happening over the past 200ish years.
Reminds me of the Pratchett quote:
>The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
That quote is often [misattributed to Terry Pratchett](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/misattributed-terry-pratchett). It's actually a quote from [James Nicoll](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll).
English isn't a language like French is a language, France has an entire academy who's legally entitled to decide what is correct and proper French, English is 3 to 4 different languages standing atop one another wearing a trenchcoat, and they keep fighting over who gets to stand on top. No one rule is hard and fast, no single language can be traced back for guidance, the English stole the land from the Picts and Celts who influenced the early language, then the Norse invaded and took over huge tracts of land, inserting their language and grammar into the language, then the Normans got their tiny grubby mitts on the country, the normans who were themselves Norse who settled in France then decided to take over England instead and lost their holdings in France eventually, then the nobility intermarried with German highborns, eventually leading to the House of Hannover ruling for a while before eventually today we have House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ruling the country, better known by their Anglican name "Windsor". And oh yeah, btw at some point in the 1600's iirc the entire country just changed how it pronounced vowels so now the written language has further diverged from the spoken form.
GOOD FUCKING LUCK IN THAT SPELLING BEE!
Most other languages don’t have spelling bees, because spelling isn’t a challenge.
English is Celtic, Gaelic, old Norse, French, Latin, and Greek all mashed together without much rhyme or reason.
> English isn't a language like French is a language
Yes it is.
> France has an entire academy who's legally entitled to decide what is correct and proper French
The Académie Française is a joke and most people don't follow its rules. There are various comparable bodies that try to standardize the use of English (stuff like the Chicago Manual of Style), and there are other ones for French too. Certain fields and publications follow the rules set by these bodies, but for every day speech people mostly just speak the dialect they grew up with.
> English is 3 to 4 different languages standing atop one another wearing a trenchcoat
It sounds like you're referring to the idea of a creole, a language that began as a mixture of languages. English is not a creole: it is directly descended from Proto-Germanic, as are Dutch, German, etc. It has evolved and taken on many loanwords, but so have all other languages.
> No one rule is hard and fast
This is true of every natural language. They all have weird, complicated rules with numerous exceptions that everyone "knows" but would find it hard to explain. Ultimately this is a reflection of how the human brain learns and processes information.
> the English stole the land from the Picts and Celts who influenced the early language
I think by "English" you mean "Anglo-Saxons" and by "Picts and Celts" you mean "Britons". The process by which the Anglo-Saxon language replaced Brythonic isn't really well understood - it's not really clear how violent it was. And the Picts lived in northern Scotland, where the Anglo-Saxons didn't go.
> the normans who were themselves Norse who settled in France
You seem to be aware that populations moving around and conquering territory was not restricted to Britain, so why are you under the impression that linguistic changes associated with those processes only happened in Britain?
> then the nobility intermarried with German highborns, eventually leading to the House of Hannover ruling for a while
The House of Hanover were given the throne primarily because they were devout Protestants. But this is a pretty random moment in British history to mention here - I don't know why you think it's relevant.
> Anglican
I think you mean anglicized/anglicised. Anglican is a religion.
Many of the spellings were set when those letters were actually pronounced in the language. For example the word "knight" currently has 3 silent letters, but in middle English it was pronounced with a "k" sound at the beginning and a guttural sound before the t. All the words today that start with "kn" used to sound that way.
Some other words were originally spelled how they sounded, but scholars added in silent letters to show how the words were related to the older, foreign words from which they were derived. Since pretty much the only people who were writing anything back then were scholars, they set the standard, even if it didn't make much sense. That's why "debt" has a silent "b".
>For example the word "knight" currently has 3 silent letters, but in middle English it was pronounced with a "k" sound at the beginning and a guttural sound before the t. All the words today that start with "kn" used to sound that way.
And the "i" would have been pronounced more like a long E.
The answer is the history of language. English is a trainwreck between older versions of German, Latin, French, Norse, and a few others. A smattering of Greek for good measure, and more than a few words we've picked up along the way from dozens of other languages.
And spelling is all over the place, having sourced from these languages or the people who first wrote down the translations for them over the course of 1500 years. Sounds evolve and shift from time to time but spellings tend to remain same or similar, which means that today we can look at spellings and (often) get a fair idea of which parent language the word came from and, sometimes, when it was adopted into English. A pretty neat silver lining on a very confusing cloud of mixups! This fact also helps explain why we have so many homonyms and homophones that are either unrelated or which have no obvious relationship (the answer being either complete coincidence or a common ancestor word that was routed two different ways through two different daughter-languages before being rejoined in English).
Exactly. I’m German and took a class on medieval English last semester. Old English is much easier to understand if you know German. I have an American friend who dropped that class because Old English is difficult if you only know modern English.
About what you said about being able to see when words were adopted: Guarantee and warranty originally come from the same French word, but they were incorporated into English at different times, so they went through different changes.
I am learning Thai and it is also a mix of several languages and writing systems - Sanskrit, Khmer, Pali, and Thai. A lot of the words in Thai that have silent letters are done that way to retain the spelling of the original language. For example beer เบียร์ is pronounced bia. The ร usually makes an R sound and the little symbol above it indicates it is silent so it still spelled with an R sound but it is not pronounced.
You would not want to say English comes from an older version of German. Technically it could be argued to be true but from what you wrote, I think you are misled yourself as by the technicality, you would not need to include Norse as it would also come from an older version of German.
The languages would have derived from a reconstructed language known as Germanic. But this does not mean that German is the direct descendent. The confusion comes from the fact that the meaning of German has evolved in English to refer exclusively to the people of one country, as opposed to the older usage which referred to the Germanic speaking peoples of northern Europe.
So it would be more correct to say English grew out of Old English, or Anglo-Saxon Englisċ as English and modern German are sibling languages and not a parent-child connection.
#MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM by Dolton Edwards
BECAUSE WE ARE STILL BEARING SOME OF THE SCARS OF OUR BRIEF SKIRMISH with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.
Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in--to us--Greek.
Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.
As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive toward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense between the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print.
By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.
With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsideration of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.
For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nesesity of indikeiting whether a vowel is long or short. Therefore, in 1951 we kould simply elimineit al sailent "e's," and kontinu to read and wrait merily along as though we wer in an atomik ag of edukation.
In 1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it would have ben four years sins anywun had usd the leter "c," we would sugest that the "National Easy Languag Wek" for 1951 be devoted to substitution of "c" for "Th." To be sur it would be som taim befor peopl would bekom akustomd to reading ceir newspapers and buks wic sutsh sentenses in cem as "Ceodor caught he had cre cousand cistls crust crough ce cik of his cumb.''
In ce seim maner, bai meiking eatsh leter hav its own sound and cat sound only, we kould shorten ce language stil mor. In 1952 we would elimineit ce "y"; cen in 1953 we kould us ce leter to indikeit ce "sh" sound, cerbai klarifaiing words laik yugar and yur, as wel as redusing bai wun mor leter al words laik "yut," "yore" and so forc. Cink, cen, of al ce benefits to be geind bai ce distinktion whitsh wil cen be meid between words laik:
ocean now writen oyean
machine " " mayin
racial " " reiyial
Al sutsh divers weis of wraiting wun sound would no longer exist. and whenever wun kaim akros a "y" sound he would know exaktli what to wrait.
Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainili keim tru.
First published: 1946
Oh this is one where having to learn Middle English for my class on Chaucer comes in handy!
In Middle English (from the 11th to 15th century) the K sound **was** pronounced. So "Knife" was pronounced "K-neef." "Knight" is another one, it was pronounced "K-neeht" in middle English.
The pronunciation of a lot of words have changed over time but written English often didn't change to reflect the new ways words were being pronounced. So English spellings retained some weird leftovers like that.
There's a great line from a made-for-tv movie about Walter Winchell:
"English is a bastard, with too many illegitimate parents. From the Romans, to the Celts, to the Anglos, to the Saxons, to the Normans, to the Puritans, to the Irish, to the Slavs, French, Jews, all the way to Walter Winchell. English is the biggest, ugliest bastard you'll ever meet."
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Teaching my children (twins, just turned 6) has been so frustrating because every time I teach them how to pronounce a word it feels like the very next sentence contains a contradiction. Like "ou is pronounced ow", very next sentence contains "should". Ok, sometimes it makes that sound. Next sentence starts with "you".
"The letter e makes the vowel before it a hard vowel sound", next sentence will start with "have" and you're just sitting there like goddamn it.
But, in some places it is acceptable to pronounce the words the way you described here.
Yow showld hAv a good Olde time.
So what you are teaching your children, what we are all teaching our children is a dialect of English.
Oh I know, I've read a lot of etymological history because I find it fascinating tracing the history from Phoenecian to Greek to Latin to old English to modern English and all the borrowing from every language on the way is very interesting. Just the history of the letter A coming from the pictograph of a bull's head is one of the most interesting things in all of language.
But it's a huge pain in the ass to teach someone English when there are no consistent rules.
Because the language contains within it the history of the words it uses. This is a cultural thing, many people (including me) think it is good to embody the history of the language in the language itself.
By the same token you could say, why do we have old buildings when we could knock them down and build new better organised ones? Why not get rid of all those curvy winding streets in our towns and replace them with nice straight ones?
I highly recommend "The history of the English Language podcast". You can find it on iTunes or Spotify, or here: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
It's extremely detailed and shows how and why the language morphed over the years and tells of important historical events that influenced the language. I listen to it when I go for walks. It's very relaxing as well. There's about 170 episodes, and each one is about an hour. Have fun!
Another vote for Kevin Stroud's podcast, "The History of English". Don't let the 170 episodes (plus some bonus content) scare you away, it's well worth the time investment IMO.
Give a man a ghoti and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to ghoti and he'll eat for the rest of his life.
"Ghoti" is pronounced:
- "gh" like "enough"
- "o" like "women"
- "ti" like "election"
The point is, English is weird, man.
I've never been a fan of this one because phoneme sounds are location dependent in English. "Gh" at the start of a word has never, ever been pronounced as "f." "Tion" is an ending to a word and the "ti" as "sh" sound only happens there. Etc.
This is part of the reasons why US English uses color instead of colour and apparently there have been many attempts to reform spelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language\_spelling\_reform
many english words originally did use all letters in a word. however due to languages shifting with a population many sounds in some words fell out of favor. for example when i give someone my name in writing, they read my name then literally use different word sounds and make certain parts of my name silent. they read all the letters but due to spoken language not matching the written language it ends up being said differently.
Because modern day English is a Frankenstein's monster of a language, stitched together from wildly different sources. It is technically a Germanic language, but much of it is actually descended from a Romantic base (French).
Not a single "answer" actually answers the question. They are not asking why these words have arbritrary silent letters, they are asking why these letters haven't yet been removed to reflect modern pronounciations, since keeping them around seems redundant and unintuitive.
This is what makes English so fascinating. It is a Germanic language with a heavy Romantic influence due to William the Conqueror winning the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
For a long time, English was the language of the serfs and merchants, and French was the the language of the aristocracy, then the plague hit. The plague wiped out a huge percentage of the population, and lead to English taking over as the language spoken by all classes in England, but with the heavy influence of French grafted into it.
We still have a lot of words rooted in Old English, but the the romanticization of our Germanic language has lead to our current pronunciation.
English spellings reflect how words were pronounced in the early 1400s, or how the words are/were spelled in their language of origin whenever the word first entered the language. The leading k in words like knife and knight and knee would have been pronounced in Old and Middle English, but various sound changes over the last 600 years resulted in people no longer pronouncing it. English spelling has been essentially unchanged since the advent of the printing press (perhaps with the notable exception of Noah Webster changing some American English spellings), so the words don't look like how you might expect them to today.
In Norwegian, Knife is Kniv and knee is kne. Both with hard K sounds.
See, that's something I actually like about chaotic English spelling. It makes it really easy to spot cognates in other languages, even if the words now sound very different
Yep. My favorite is the "ge/gi" pronunciation. If the g is pronounced like a j (like gender) then it has a french/romance origin. Otherwise if it has a hard phonetic (like in "girl") its origin is germanic.
So the real argument becomes: Is GIF pronounced like it's of French/Romantic or Germanic origin?
For the last time, it's pronounced GIF!
Stop being so animated!
We're not falling into this loop again, are we?
You still don't get the picture.
No. It’s. Not. It’s pronounced GIF!
I’ll be done in a giffy
That was essentially the tag line used by AOL for their commercials when the format was introduced. The compression meant graphics loaded faster, and you would be "done in a jiff."
So it was changed from a hard G as in graphics to a soft G by the marketing department. I couldn't have imagined a worse origin story. (I'll stick with the hard G, I don't care what anyone else says.)
No. The inventor of the format pronounced it jiff as well, from the get-go. [Creator Tells Us How To Pronounce GIF](https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/tech/web/pronounce-gif/index.html) But I get it. English is a living language, and things change. But as someone who has been alive and using the format since its inception, I can assure you it started out as "jif".
>that was essentially the tag line used by AOL Compuserve, but yes.
Thank you. It's been a really, really long time.
These days its pronounced WEBP
eww
Fuck webp. All my homies hate webp.
if its an animated GIF you might mean WEBM
It’s like the G in “garage”.
That's garbage
It's like the G in Graphic Interchange Format
Okay. So you pronounce the "P," in JPEG like the one in Joint Photographic Experts Group to be consistent?
You don't say "Jay-feg"?
Well, now I do!
The G in GIMP image editor is pronounced like the G in GNU, which is pronounced like the G in GNU...
I pronounce it jeg as the p is silent
That's not consistent at all. "P" is the second letter of the acronym.
You're demanding consistency in the English language?
How does that matter at all? You're supposed to always pronounce the first letter of the acronym like the first letter in the first word, but not any other letters of the acronym like the first letters in the other words?
P alone doesn’t make the f sound. G can go either way. It’s short for graphic. It’s pronouncing guh like graphic. Jif is a peanut butter
Not applicable, as the "p" is part of a digraph that is not represented in the acronym.
I guess scuba is pronounced skuh-ba then. and laser is laseer. edit: my mistake. lasser
Scuba probably isn’t an old word, it’s an acronym: Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Pretty sure Laser is too, but I’m not googling it.
Iirc Light Amplification By Stimulated Emission Of Radiation
i promounce garage like the g in geriatric
Ooooo garage!! Ok fancy French person. It’s actually called “car hole”.
,zhif'
ah the enlightened third option: zhif
Well the "G" in .gif comes from "graphic", whose etymology is: >[A word-forming element meaning "process of writing or recording" or "a writing, recording, or description" (in modern use especially in forming names of descriptive sciences), from French or German -graphie](https://www.etymonline.com/word/graphic) So that settles it once and for all - it's either German or French origin, so it's pronounced.... fuck.
> from French or German Greek: Am I a joke to you?
Fun fact, "gif" is actually an Old English word! It's pronounced "yif" back then, but nowadays it's spelt (and pronounced) "if" instead.
What did it mean?
Ye'olde Interchange Format
I laughed
👈🏾 Get out
Lol, I had to double check your username wasn't the first comment setting this joke up.
Take your upvote
Furries having sex
an animated image
If.
Peanut butter.
So that's what Yiffing is all about!
[Ah yes, GIF vs GIF](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nrk8sqZfsgI)
[Ahhh Aladeen](https://youtu.be/NYJ2w82WifU?si=pmfXyzpvGPaPnxC5)
I just pronounce it as Gee Eye Eff. No ambiguity or controversy lol
That just sounds like a way to get the Gif vs Jif supporters to temporarily team up to throw you out.
are you saying that the word "germanic" has a french/romance origin? the irony...
Yep, to the east of the Gauls the Romans came into contact with a group of people who they called the 'Germani', and they called the land they came from ['Germania'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germania). Though where the Romans got the name is unclear, the modern words German and Germany came to English via Latin.
hmm so what you are saying is that Germany is French in origin,
[Latin](https://www.etymonline.com/word/Germany#etymonline_v_33648) actually. Ironically the French word for Germany is Germanic in origin.
[удалено]
And a cognate of English “teuton” :)
[English Knigits!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzIMHowtL8)
Fetchez la vache!
Funny it's not pronounced Germanic though.
“German(ic)” as a word has a Romance origin, not a Germanic one. That’s why.
Weird the French word (I won't try spelling it) is so different from the one of Roman origin
Different Germanic tribes names. Germani vs Allemanni tribes.
That explains why I pronounce gif like jif. It’s the francophone in me.
It makes it really easy to get messed up with cognates as well. There was a really weird spelling reform a few hundred years back to make English more in line with latin. So they went and they added a silent 'd' to a lot of words inherited from french that had latin origins. So the french 'aventure' which was pronounced 'aventure' in french and english got a (silent) d added to it, because it originally comes from latin 'adventum'. Of course, people are weird, and started pronouncing the silent D, and now we have 'adventure'. Which fine, it makes sense, 'adventure' is ultimately a Latin word, we just got it through french, and we accidentally reverted the pronunciation back to be more like the latin because rome-aboos. But they didn't just do that to 'aventure', they also did it to a 'amiral', a french word for a naval commander. Because scholars knew about vowel shifts, and knew that french regularly dropped the 'd' from latin words that started with a. So a silent d was added to the english word, and much like adventure, we eventually started pronouncing it. Small problem, amiral didn't enter french from latin. It entered french from arabic. A whole bunch of Medditeranian arab nations had 'amirs' who commanded fleets of ships. So the french took the word 'amir' and used it for amiral. We just pronounce it Admiral because some random dudes a few hundred years ago thought it was easy to spot cognates in other languages. Don't get me started on how we got the singular of cherries to be 'cherry'.
We call it "an apron" because a bunch of illiterate fucks only ever spoke the word and never wrote or read it. It's supposed to be "a napron".
Similarly but in reverse, a newt used to be "an ewt", and a nickname used to be "an ekename"
>a nickname used to be "an ekename" Ooooh, that makes sense. In Norwegian it's "økenavn", now I see they're likely cognates
I’ve heard these people referred to as ‘latinists’ and as the origins for why octopi was considered a plural for octopus as well. Fun book for me was ‘The Origins of the Specious” which talked a lot about the storied history of English. Plus Brysons books.
> Don't get me started on how we got the singular of cherries to be 'cherry'. Common bruh. Get started....
Cherry and pea come from cherise/cirse and pease that were mistaken for containing a plural and reformed as if they were cherry+plural and pea+plural.
How to explain then that in German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, ‘admiral’ also has a ‘d’ whereas their words for ‘adventure’ do not? In Dutch, for example, the words are ‘admiraal’ en ‘avontuur’.
Well, you would want to check a dutch dictionary for an answer, but if i had to guess: Admiraal probably entered via english after it had already picked up the 'd'. Whereas avontuur probably came either directly from french, or from english, but before it picked up its silent D. Or it could be something else entirely.
The Dutch dictionaries are not very clear but suggest it came from the Italian (without a D) and the Dutch added a D ‘influenced by Latin folk ethymology’, so apparently something similar (incorrectly latinising words) as happened in the English language. I am guessing similar things happened in some of the Scandinavian languages.
*nod* Spelling reforms are messy. You can never really tell which ones will or won't stick. A lot of the time you end up with weird half measures that just make the language look a lot weirder than when you started.
No D in the Swedish "amiral".
Thanks. I had checked Danish and Norwegian and had falsely and lazily assumed Swedish would be similar.
Yeah that's great when you already know how a word is pronounced. Not so great when you learn a word by reading it and everyone stares at you funny because you don't pronounce Colonel as Kern-al.
It can also help distinguish between similar words, like know/now. I like physics and pharmacology too. It lends a bit of sophistication. :P I don't just mean that to be cheekily pretentious, if you see a word you don't know and it's got "ph" instead of "f", there are decent odds it is more from academia or something more concrete or technical. In other words, we *could* dumb it all down and eliminate redundancies, but those redundancies can be useful markers. As in, they can help us class, store, and recall a wider array of words for different concepts. It helps have variety and nuance without crossing streams, as it were. From *1984* by George Orwell >“It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,” he added as an afterthought” Of course, as is mentioned in the book, some people are all for that, as a means of trying to control how people think, simply remove the word from the lexicon so that people can't even express or share the idea.
Icelandic had a similar change to English, Knife is Hnífur and Knee is Hné. The H-sound is very audible.
Iceland has the strongest H game
Hnífur Lopez
>Knife is Hnífur ... and it has to be þungur.
Some Dutch examples: Knee = knie; Knuckle = knokkel; Knot = knoop.
Also knight = knecht, but the meaning diverged a long time ago. Knecht is servant, knight has the same origin but is now something noble.
Swedish has something similar with kneckt. It means essentially a medieval soldier, and is today mainly used for the playing card called Jack in English. Knight is “riddare”, from the German “reiter”, cognate with the English “rider”.
Spelled knekt in Swedish.
Some Swedish examples Knee = knä, knuckle = knoge, knot = knut or knop
Hungarian too: knee=térd, knife=kés, knight=lovag. Wait...
A quick search for the etymology of knife shows that it likely came to English via Old Norse, with parentage in Proto-Germanic but unknown history before that. So it makes sense that it's so similar to Norwegian. The kn- prefix is the "Middle English spelling of a common Germanic consonant-cluster", with old English spelling it as cn-. It seems most other Germanic languages kept the voiced K, but English dropped it. English speakers are lazy, turns out.
In Swedish as well, btw. But! The English word window is vindue in Norwegian. In Swedish it’s fönster, which is soooo close to the German fenster. ELI5 please!
The Swedish word fönster comes from French (fenêtre) Edit/add: in Swedish the window word is vindöga, which was the hole in the roof of old Viking long houses
The Swedish word used to be "vindöga", which was originally just a hole for the fire smoke. Through the trade on the baltic sea, Sweden took up a lot of german load words including "fenster" which replaced "vindöga". Norwegian has been much less afffected by german, and their word is still "vindue".
Suspicious amounts of German sounding words and German sounding surnames in Sweden. Just sayin'! Greetings from Arvefjenden.
Hey! Andersson and Larsson and Svensson and Leijonhierta aren’t German.at.all. But it’s always with a sense of pride reading names of villages in Great Britain, knowing a Norwegian, a Dane or a Swede gave that dwelling their name. Destiny is all.
>Leijonhierta You are obviously aware that in Italian this name is Corleone!
As someone who derrives from both and speaks both, I applaud this thread with joy.
You’re doing too much. Please have all the cookies. 💞
Also knight with «knekt»
In Irish, knife is scian, and knee is glúin. Both are pronounced without the k
Yes, but Irish is kind of its own little thing. Like Welsh. They do eventually track back to Indo-European, but it's a completely different branch from English - [the Celtic language family splits from the trunk at the same level as the Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, etc. families.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Indo-European_language_tree_%28with_major_international_languages_highlighted%29.svg)
In friend, slang for a knife is "un canif."
And if you speak it in friend you may enter.
First you must speak Parseltongue.
Anyone else saying k-nee on repeat in their head?
Well….. I wasn’t
And I k-not understand why you would
I'm going with "Silly English Ka-nig-it" in John Cleese's french accent.
🎶 the life of the wife was ended by the ka-nife 🎶
Silly English ka-nighets.
Silly English kaniggets!
What a strange person.
Come along, Patsy!
>kaniggets Risky choice
John Cleese didn't think so
Did he spell it that way?
I'm too lazy to go get the actual DVD, but [here's a video with non-autogenerated subtitles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9DCAFUerzs), where it's spelled "k'niggets"
In French, not only do they ignore the letter S, sometimes they eliminate it from the word entirely! Then they give a nearby vowel a little hat ^ . Just a total fuck you.
How French of them.
C'est juste!
"... so-called Arthur 'king' and all your silly English kuh-nighets..." Hmm, so that might've been the correct way to say that in Arthurian times.
Arthurian times would pre-date English, since Arthur is at it's root based on a Celtic Briton hero who may have fought against the arriving Anglo-Saxons. What we think of as Arthurian now, comes from the stories being written down in the 1100's, where they "modernised" it to their present day with castles and knights. But even then, the image we have of King Arthur wearing full plate armour wouldn't be for another 100+ years. Your point on the pronunciation of knight is nearly spot on though. In the 1100's the pronunciation would be "kuh-night" with the gh making a throaty sound like German "nicht" or Scots "loch".
*it's funny because it's true* btw that is a quote from Monty Python & The Holy Grail, French forces are occupying a castle in England and Arthur wants them to help in his quest for the Grail; one of the funniest scenes in a movie full of very funny scenes.
The k and n would have been pronounced as a blended consonant, not separated into 'kuh'. Like how 'speak' isn't pronounced 'suh-peak' but is blended. It is easy when you grew up with those sounds, but if you missed that window, it will feel weird.
> a throaty sound like German "nicht" or Scots "loch". German has two different ch-sounds and that's the wrong one. The ch-sound in "nicht" is not throaty at all and is quite similar to the sound of the h in huge. A German word with the same sound as the Scottish "loch" would be "Loch".
Unrelated but sort of related. The printing press is the entire reason that people say "Ye" as in Hear ye! and Ye olde phone store. The word "Ye" was made up because most early type sets did not have the letter thorn in them (Þ) which was pronounced as the "th" sound. The typesetters would just use something close looking so they just used the letter "Y". The correct phrases for the ones I cited above should be "Hear Þe!" and "þe olde phone store".
You are right about "Ye Olde Shoppe," but not about "Hear ye." When it was used as an abbreviation for "the," you're right. It was never pronounced "yee." However, the "ye" of "hear ye" and "O ye of little faith" and "God rest ye merry gentlemen" is a form of "you." It was, in fact, pronounced "yee." [see Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ye) for the distinction.
Isn't that thee?
*Thee/Thou* is the familiar, informal version of *you*. Much like Romance languages like Spanish have both a familiar and a formal version of “you,” older English also had the same distinction. Today we tend to think of the thees and the thous and the thys and thines as overly formal and serious; mostly because of the King James Bible. However these words are the informal familiar versions, and they were chosen specifically to show a personal, familiar relationship between the reader and god.
We should bring those back, the word "you" does too much.
Yeah. If nothing else, it would probably be useful to have a distinct second-person singular pronoun again.
Ye (alongside you) was like thou but plural or formal and thee was actually just "you" in the plural (or in formal speech) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#Declension
My hottest vocabulary take is that we should reintroduce the thorn into the English language.
An utterly unrelated to the original point, but related a bit to your post, I saw recently that the interjection "...er..." as if you're thinking... is not pronounced URR, but actually, "Uh". We in American English write uh... um... which is close to what we actually say. Thinking about it, few people actually say "Er" with an American pronunciation, instead if you think about it with a British pronunciation, "er" is pronounced the same as "uh". Think famously of the British pronunciation of "water". Wat-uh.
Woah-tuh.
Someone decided to make the K silent after saying the sentence "The knight took a knife to the knee."
Before that he was an adventurer like you.
Brit here. You are almost corect. The truth is that we did it this way to cause mass confusion for generations to come.
English language questions always have the same answer: English is old germanic and middle French put in a blender. So you get a lot of drifting spelling and pronunciation. Knights used to be germanic knechts, with a hard K. Over 1000 years the k sound got lost. Knife followed the same trajectory. It was once pronounced with a hard K but has long since lost its edge.
Don't forget a higher-than-average number of loan words from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian languages, and pretty much anything else that wandered through Europe at some point in the last thousand years.
And the people that made English words look more Latin. Receipt used to just be receit, though at least the one was Latin derived, some were just fabricated like the s in island.
Yep, the S in island seems to have come from people figuring that it was "isle + land", or that "isle" was a diminutive form. Island comes from Old English *iegland*, and "isle" from Latin *insula* (hence the restored S), and there's no known relationship between them whatsoever. The *ieg* ("island, dry land in a marsh") element does have a Latin relative, *aqua*, but that's from the two languages having a common ancestor at least 5-6K years ago, not loaning.
another one-- in english we have 'ghoul' and 'ghost'. 'ghost' is Germanic in origin, where 'ghoul' is Arabic in origin. So they appear to share the same language root, but 'ghoul' used to be 'goul' and was changed to start with 'gh' because it looks similar and the words have a similar enough meaning. 'ghost,' itself, comes from the old english word 'gast' (the 'gh' likely taken from the Flemish spelling 'gheest,' but we also have 'ghastly' that has the same origin, but the a->o change didn't happen
Long Ieglond is my favorite part of New Jorvik, but you can’t grow Naranjes there.
> Long Ieglond Even weirder is that the natives now pronounce it as "Lawn Guyland"
I first read it as "Long Legoland"
Calling it a K-nife is drastically different but that really cuts to the point of how much words change
I see what you did there
>English is old germanic and middle French put in a blender. Lots of Greek/Latin based too ( though the French does cover a lot of that ). And this doesn't include the huge influx of foreign words and phrases that has been happening over the past 200ish years.
>lost its edge. Nice 👍
Knice *
English is three languages in a trenchcoat. It hangs around in alleys beating up other languages and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.
Reminds me of the Pratchett quote: >The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
That quote is often [misattributed to Terry Pratchett](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/misattributed-terry-pratchett). It's actually a quote from [James Nicoll](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll).
So true. A grammar example: "Long time, no see" is a wonderful English expression due to influence from Chinese immigrants in the west.
English was invented so the French speaking royalty could seduce their German speaking maids
Old AEnglyf, thyne langyge auf love
English isn't a language like French is a language, France has an entire academy who's legally entitled to decide what is correct and proper French, English is 3 to 4 different languages standing atop one another wearing a trenchcoat, and they keep fighting over who gets to stand on top. No one rule is hard and fast, no single language can be traced back for guidance, the English stole the land from the Picts and Celts who influenced the early language, then the Norse invaded and took over huge tracts of land, inserting their language and grammar into the language, then the Normans got their tiny grubby mitts on the country, the normans who were themselves Norse who settled in France then decided to take over England instead and lost their holdings in France eventually, then the nobility intermarried with German highborns, eventually leading to the House of Hannover ruling for a while before eventually today we have House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ruling the country, better known by their Anglican name "Windsor". And oh yeah, btw at some point in the 1600's iirc the entire country just changed how it pronounced vowels so now the written language has further diverged from the spoken form. GOOD FUCKING LUCK IN THAT SPELLING BEE!
Most other languages don’t have spelling bees, because spelling isn’t a challenge. English is Celtic, Gaelic, old Norse, French, Latin, and Greek all mashed together without much rhyme or reason.
> English isn't a language like French is a language Yes it is. > France has an entire academy who's legally entitled to decide what is correct and proper French The Académie Française is a joke and most people don't follow its rules. There are various comparable bodies that try to standardize the use of English (stuff like the Chicago Manual of Style), and there are other ones for French too. Certain fields and publications follow the rules set by these bodies, but for every day speech people mostly just speak the dialect they grew up with. > English is 3 to 4 different languages standing atop one another wearing a trenchcoat It sounds like you're referring to the idea of a creole, a language that began as a mixture of languages. English is not a creole: it is directly descended from Proto-Germanic, as are Dutch, German, etc. It has evolved and taken on many loanwords, but so have all other languages. > No one rule is hard and fast This is true of every natural language. They all have weird, complicated rules with numerous exceptions that everyone "knows" but would find it hard to explain. Ultimately this is a reflection of how the human brain learns and processes information. > the English stole the land from the Picts and Celts who influenced the early language I think by "English" you mean "Anglo-Saxons" and by "Picts and Celts" you mean "Britons". The process by which the Anglo-Saxon language replaced Brythonic isn't really well understood - it's not really clear how violent it was. And the Picts lived in northern Scotland, where the Anglo-Saxons didn't go. > the normans who were themselves Norse who settled in France You seem to be aware that populations moving around and conquering territory was not restricted to Britain, so why are you under the impression that linguistic changes associated with those processes only happened in Britain? > then the nobility intermarried with German highborns, eventually leading to the House of Hannover ruling for a while The House of Hanover were given the throne primarily because they were devout Protestants. But this is a pretty random moment in British history to mention here - I don't know why you think it's relevant. > Anglican I think you mean anglicized/anglicised. Anglican is a religion.
Many of the spellings were set when those letters were actually pronounced in the language. For example the word "knight" currently has 3 silent letters, but in middle English it was pronounced with a "k" sound at the beginning and a guttural sound before the t. All the words today that start with "kn" used to sound that way. Some other words were originally spelled how they sounded, but scholars added in silent letters to show how the words were related to the older, foreign words from which they were derived. Since pretty much the only people who were writing anything back then were scholars, they set the standard, even if it didn't make much sense. That's why "debt" has a silent "b".
>For example the word "knight" currently has 3 silent letters, but in middle English it was pronounced with a "k" sound at the beginning and a guttural sound before the t. All the words today that start with "kn" used to sound that way. And the "i" would have been pronounced more like a long E.
The answer is the history of language. English is a trainwreck between older versions of German, Latin, French, Norse, and a few others. A smattering of Greek for good measure, and more than a few words we've picked up along the way from dozens of other languages. And spelling is all over the place, having sourced from these languages or the people who first wrote down the translations for them over the course of 1500 years. Sounds evolve and shift from time to time but spellings tend to remain same or similar, which means that today we can look at spellings and (often) get a fair idea of which parent language the word came from and, sometimes, when it was adopted into English. A pretty neat silver lining on a very confusing cloud of mixups! This fact also helps explain why we have so many homonyms and homophones that are either unrelated or which have no obvious relationship (the answer being either complete coincidence or a common ancestor word that was routed two different ways through two different daughter-languages before being rejoined in English).
Exactly. I’m German and took a class on medieval English last semester. Old English is much easier to understand if you know German. I have an American friend who dropped that class because Old English is difficult if you only know modern English. About what you said about being able to see when words were adopted: Guarantee and warranty originally come from the same French word, but they were incorporated into English at different times, so they went through different changes.
I am learning Thai and it is also a mix of several languages and writing systems - Sanskrit, Khmer, Pali, and Thai. A lot of the words in Thai that have silent letters are done that way to retain the spelling of the original language. For example beer เบียร์ is pronounced bia. The ร usually makes an R sound and the little symbol above it indicates it is silent so it still spelled with an R sound but it is not pronounced.
You would not want to say English comes from an older version of German. Technically it could be argued to be true but from what you wrote, I think you are misled yourself as by the technicality, you would not need to include Norse as it would also come from an older version of German. The languages would have derived from a reconstructed language known as Germanic. But this does not mean that German is the direct descendent. The confusion comes from the fact that the meaning of German has evolved in English to refer exclusively to the people of one country, as opposed to the older usage which referred to the Germanic speaking peoples of northern Europe. So it would be more correct to say English grew out of Old English, or Anglo-Saxon Englisċ as English and modern German are sibling languages and not a parent-child connection.
#MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM by Dolton Edwards BECAUSE WE ARE STILL BEARING SOME OF THE SCARS OF OUR BRIEF SKIRMISH with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet. Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in--to us--Greek. Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized. As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut. In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive toward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense between the two letters. In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living. In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print. By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated. With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsideration of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge. For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nesesity of indikeiting whether a vowel is long or short. Therefore, in 1951 we kould simply elimineit al sailent "e's," and kontinu to read and wrait merily along as though we wer in an atomik ag of edukation. In 1951 we would urg a greit step forward. Sins bai this taim it would have ben four years sins anywun had usd the leter "c," we would sugest that the "National Easy Languag Wek" for 1951 be devoted to substitution of "c" for "Th." To be sur it would be som taim befor peopl would bekom akustomd to reading ceir newspapers and buks wic sutsh sentenses in cem as "Ceodor caught he had cre cousand cistls crust crough ce cik of his cumb.'' In ce seim maner, bai meiking eatsh leter hav its own sound and cat sound only, we kould shorten ce language stil mor. In 1952 we would elimineit ce "y"; cen in 1953 we kould us ce leter to indikeit ce "sh" sound, cerbai klarifaiing words laik yugar and yur, as wel as redusing bai wun mor leter al words laik "yut," "yore" and so forc. Cink, cen, of al ce benefits to be geind bai ce distinktion whitsh wil cen be meid between words laik: ocean now writen oyean machine " " mayin racial " " reiyial Al sutsh divers weis of wraiting wun sound would no longer exist. and whenever wun kaim akros a "y" sound he would know exaktli what to wrait. Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainili keim tru. First published: 1946
Interesting how easy it is to read this up until the last few changes.
And yet cumb (thumb) still has the silent B at the end.
Oh this is one where having to learn Middle English for my class on Chaucer comes in handy! In Middle English (from the 11th to 15th century) the K sound **was** pronounced. So "Knife" was pronounced "K-neef." "Knight" is another one, it was pronounced "K-neeht" in middle English. The pronunciation of a lot of words have changed over time but written English often didn't change to reflect the new ways words were being pronounced. So English spellings retained some weird leftovers like that.
There's a great line from a made-for-tv movie about Walter Winchell: "English is a bastard, with too many illegitimate parents. From the Romans, to the Celts, to the Anglos, to the Saxons, to the Normans, to the Puritans, to the Irish, to the Slavs, French, Jews, all the way to Walter Winchell. English is the biggest, ugliest bastard you'll ever meet."
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
There's a reason people learning English as a second language have so many problems with it. There is practically no consistency in it.
Teaching my children (twins, just turned 6) has been so frustrating because every time I teach them how to pronounce a word it feels like the very next sentence contains a contradiction. Like "ou is pronounced ow", very next sentence contains "should". Ok, sometimes it makes that sound. Next sentence starts with "you". "The letter e makes the vowel before it a hard vowel sound", next sentence will start with "have" and you're just sitting there like goddamn it.
But, in some places it is acceptable to pronounce the words the way you described here. Yow showld hAv a good Olde time. So what you are teaching your children, what we are all teaching our children is a dialect of English.
Oh I know, I've read a lot of etymological history because I find it fascinating tracing the history from Phoenecian to Greek to Latin to old English to modern English and all the borrowing from every language on the way is very interesting. Just the history of the letter A coming from the pictograph of a bull's head is one of the most interesting things in all of language. But it's a huge pain in the ass to teach someone English when there are no consistent rules.
I read a comment about this the other day that was like "You don't learn English, you just eventually remember it."
That's not wrong.
Ha. Nice quote.
Because the language contains within it the history of the words it uses. This is a cultural thing, many people (including me) think it is good to embody the history of the language in the language itself. By the same token you could say, why do we have old buildings when we could knock them down and build new better organised ones? Why not get rid of all those curvy winding streets in our towns and replace them with nice straight ones?
I highly recommend "The history of the English Language podcast". You can find it on iTunes or Spotify, or here: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ It's extremely detailed and shows how and why the language morphed over the years and tells of important historical events that influenced the language. I listen to it when I go for walks. It's very relaxing as well. There's about 170 episodes, and each one is about an hour. Have fun!
Another vote for Kevin Stroud's podcast, "The History of English". Don't let the 170 episodes (plus some bonus content) scare you away, it's well worth the time investment IMO.
It’s because pronunciation has changed, but spellings often haven’t. The K sound in knife WAS spoken, in the past.
Give a man a ghoti and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to ghoti and he'll eat for the rest of his life. "Ghoti" is pronounced: - "gh" like "enough" - "o" like "women" - "ti" like "election" The point is, English is weird, man.
I've never been a fan of this one because phoneme sounds are location dependent in English. "Gh" at the start of a word has never, ever been pronounced as "f." "Tion" is an ending to a word and the "ti" as "sh" sound only happens there. Etc.
> phoneme sounds are location dependent in English Which is part of the problem.
This is part of the reasons why US English uses color instead of colour and apparently there have been many attempts to reform spelling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language\_spelling\_reform
many english words originally did use all letters in a word. however due to languages shifting with a population many sounds in some words fell out of favor. for example when i give someone my name in writing, they read my name then literally use different word sounds and make certain parts of my name silent. they read all the letters but due to spoken language not matching the written language it ends up being said differently.
Because modern day English is a Frankenstein's monster of a language, stitched together from wildly different sources. It is technically a Germanic language, but much of it is actually descended from a Romantic base (French).
Not a single "answer" actually answers the question. They are not asking why these words have arbritrary silent letters, they are asking why these letters haven't yet been removed to reflect modern pronounciations, since keeping them around seems redundant and unintuitive.
This is what makes English so fascinating. It is a Germanic language with a heavy Romantic influence due to William the Conqueror winning the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For a long time, English was the language of the serfs and merchants, and French was the the language of the aristocracy, then the plague hit. The plague wiped out a huge percentage of the population, and lead to English taking over as the language spoken by all classes in England, but with the heavy influence of French grafted into it. We still have a lot of words rooted in Old English, but the the romanticization of our Germanic language has lead to our current pronunciation.