2. What are silent letters?
Silent letters are letters that appear
in the spelling of words, but don’t
make a sound.
3. So how many English words
have silent letters?
“According to Kent Jones, Education Committee,
Esperanto Society of Chicago, ‘More than 60% of
(English) words have silent letters.’”
British Council (n.d.)
4. What caused English to
have so many silent letters?
• Historical change
• Letters added to make the spelling look Latin or
French
• Borrowed words from other languages
• Sound combinations too difficult to say
5. Why should it matter to
me as a teacher?
• The silent letters can be confusing to
many learners, whether they speak
English as their first or second
language.
• The confusion can result in delays
with reading, writing, as well as
speaking English.
6. What good is it to have
silent letters?
• Distinguish between words that sound similar.
• They sometimes help to show long vowels or hard
consonants.
• They connect root words with affixes.
• They give insight into the meaning of a word.
• They give clues as to where the stress should be
in a word.
7. What are the different
kinds of silent letters?
• Auxiliary letters
– Exocentric digraphs
– Endocentric digraphs
• Dummy letters
– Inert letters
– Empty letters
9. Auxiliary-
exocentric digraphs
• Not really considered silent, but
worth mentioning.
• “where the sound of the digraph is
different from that of either of its
constituent letters.”
Wikipedia (n.d.)
12. Auxiliary-
endocentric digraphs
• Doubled consonants, such as when adding suffixes
or inflection. Does not include geminate
consonants.
• Digraphs with the second element as magic e.
• Others that add a second element for various
reasons
13. Dummy Letters
“bear no relation to neighboring
letters and have no correspondence
in pronunciation.”
Wikipedia (n.d.)
16. Are there rules I can
teach students?
• Axel Wijk wrote 100 rules for English spelling in
1959. May be unrealistic to try to teach.
• More realistic to have students memorize sight
words.
17. Works Cited
Beare, Kenneth. (n.d.). Pronunciation – Silent Letters. Retrieved from
http://esl.about.com/od/speakingenglish/a/silent.htm.
British Council. (n.d.). Grammar: Silent Letters. Retrieved from
http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-grammar-silent-letters.htm.
Carney, Edward. (1994). A Survey of English Spelling. London: Routledge.
Carney, 1997. English Spelling. London: Routledge.
Cook, Vivian. (n.d.). Silent Letters in English. Retrieved from
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/EnglishSpellingSystem/SilentLetters.htm.
Cook, Vivian. (1999). Teaching Spelling. Retrieved from
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Writings/Papers/TeachingSpelling..htm
HowtoLearnEnglish. (2000-2010). English Language: Silent Letters. Retrieved from
http://www.howtolearnenglish.co.uk/english-language-silent-letters.html
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Silent Letter. Retrieved from http://en.wikpedia.org/wiki/Silent_letter.
Editor's Notes
Hi, my name is Julie Peters. Today I will be presenting on Silent Letters in English.
Historical Change: According to Britishcouncil.org, Old English was 90% phonemic (meaning the words sounded the same as they looked). But from the beginning of the 15th century, we began to borrow words from other languages. Because other languages have different grammar and usage rules, the words we adopted from them did not follow the same rules we use to pronounce words in English.
The English language borrowed the Latin alphabet, and so we have only got 26 letters to represent around 41 different significant sounds. That means we have to attempt to use combinations of letters to represent sounds.
In the Middle English Period, William Caxton brought the printing press to England. As time passed, pronunciation continued to change, but the printing press preserved the old spelling. Modern day English is only about 40% phonemic- meaning the words sound the way they are spelled. Some examples would be hope, knot, and light.
Letters added to make spelling look Latin or French: Medieval spellings of French loan words (dette, doute) were without the letter b. The b was added to connect words to their Latin origin from which the French words came (debit, dubitative); however the b remained silent in English (debt, doubt). Some other examples are: island and victual.
Sound combinations too difficult to say: Some sound combinations are just difficult to say so over time, some letters become silent. Examples would be: handkerchief and sandwich.
Borrowed words from other languages: We borrowed many words from other languages and kept their spelling. (champagne, khaki, myrrh)
Distinguish between words that sound similar: words like whole and hole; plum and plumb, hour and our.
Silent letters show the long vowels in rid/ride; and they show the hard consonants in gest/guest.
Connect: some root words like resign have a silent letter to show that it comes from the root word resignation (where the g is pronounced).
They give insight into the meaning of a word. An example would be vineyard. The e is silent but by having the e there, we are given a clue that it is related to vines.
They give clues as to where the stress should be in a word. An example would be giraffe. The last f and the e are silent, but by having them there, we are given the clue that the stress is on the second syllable, not the first.
This is just a snapshot of the types. I will discuss each in more depth on the next few pages.
Auxiliary letters combined with another letter constitutes a digraph: two letters combined which represent a single phoneme.
English lacks the letter: words that use the engma, like sing, or the theta in thing, or the eth in then, or whatever other combinations like the sh in show. English didn’t have a letter to correspond with the sound, so we improvised.
In some words, we have the letter but it gets replaced with another letter or combination of letters because of the word’s origin. Some examples are: psychology, mnemonic.
Doubled consonants, such as when adding suffixes or inflection, would be like the two bs in clubbed; whereas a geminate consonant like misspell has two s’s but neither is really silent.
Many of us faintly remember hearing about how the magic e is added to the end of some words to change the vowel to a long vowel. Words like rate are pronounced rate instead of rat because we add the “magic e” It tells us that the vowel will be long.
There are others that add a second element too for various reasons. The combination of ck can be seen as a doubling for k in some words. Or the gu in words like guard and vogue alert you to sound the g as it being hard, since g can sometimes sound like a j.
This is basically what I mentioned earlier about words that show the root word by keeping the silent letter, such as resign coming from the root word, or cognate, resignation. Other examples would be damn from damnation. Notice how the n is silent in damn, but not in damnation. Also phlegm…it comes from phlegmatic where the g is pronounced.
These are seen in words like answer, where the w is silent; honest, where the h is silent; island, where the s is silent; and subtle, where the b is silent.
According to British Council.org, Axel Wijk (in his book Regularized English, published in 1959) came up with over 100 rules for English spelling. It is claimed that by using these rules, you can spell up to 85% of the words in English with 90% accuracy. The reality of it though is that learning, or even teaching, all those rules would be unrealistic.
It would probably be more realistic to have students memorize sight words, with the hope that they learn some patterns and apply the patterns appropriately. To help with that, I have compiled a list of silent letters for you to keep.
These are the references I used for my presentation. Thank you.
