In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. Silent letters create problems for both native and non-native speakers of a language, as they make it more difficult to guess the spellings of spoken words or the pronunciations of written words. Newly developed alphabets for previously unwritten languages are thus typically designed to have no silent letters. Likewise, planned languages such as Interlingua and Esperanto tend to avoid silent letters. A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia. ... Look up pronunciation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A constructed or artificial language — known colloquially as a conlang — is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been devised by an individual or small group, instead of having naturally evolved as part of a culture. ... Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). ... Look up Esperanto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

English

One of the noted deficiencies of English spelling is a high number of silent letters. Carney distinguishes different kinds of "silent" letter, which present differing degrees of difficulty to readers and writers. English spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts and contains many inconsistencies between spelling and pronunciation, necessitating rote learning for anyone learning to read or write English. ...

• Auxiliary letters which constitute digraphs, where two letters combine to represent a single phoneme. These may further be categorized as
  • "exocentric" digraphs, where the sound of the digraph is different from that of either of its constituent letters. These are rarely considered "silent". There are examples
    • where the phoneme has no standard single-letter representation, as with consonants <ng> for /ŋ/ as in sing, <th> for /θ/ as in thin or /ð/ as in then, and <sh> for /ʃ/ as in show, and diphthongs <ou> in out or <oi> in point. These are the default spellings for the relevant sounds and present no special difficulty for readers or writers.
    • where standard single-letter representation uses another letter, as with <gh> in enough or <ph> in physical instead of <f>. These are irregular for writers but may be less difficult for readers.
  • "endocentric" digraphs, where the sound of the digraph is the same as that of one of its constituent letters. These include
    • most doubled consonants, as <bb> in clubbed; though not geminate consonants, as <ss> in misspell. Doubling due to suffixation or inflection is regular; otherwise it may present difficulty to writers (e.g. accommodate is often misspelt) but not to readers.
    • the discontiguous digraphs whose second element is "magic e", e.g. <a_e> in rate, <i_e> in fine. This is the regular way to represent "long" vowels in the last syllable of a morpheme.
    • others such as <ck> (which is in effect the "doubled" form of <c>), <gu> as in guard, vogue; <ea> as in bread, heavy, etc. These are difficult for writers and sometimes for readers.
• Dummy letters which bear no relation to neighbouring letters and have no correspondence in pronunciation
  • Some are inert letters, where the letter is sounded in a cognate word: e.g. <n> in damn (cf. damnation); <g> in phlegm (cf. phlegmatic); <a> in practically (cf. practical). If the cognate is obvious, it may aid writers in spelling, but mislead readers in pronunciation.
  • The rest are empty letters which never have a sound, e.g. <w> in answer, <h> in honest, <s> in island, <b> in subtle. These present the greatest difficulty to writers and often to readers.

The distinction between "endocentric" digraphs and empty letters is somewhat arbitrary. For example, in such words as little and bottle one might view <le> as an "endocentric" digraph for /l̩/, or view <e> as an empty letter; similarly with <bu> or <u> in buy and build. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... In phonetics, a diphthong (in Greek &#948;&#943;&#966;&#952;&#959;&#947;&#947;&#959;&#962;) is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ... In phonetics, gemination is when a spoken consonant is doubled, so that it is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a single consonant. ... Suffix has meanings in linguistics, nomenclature and computer science. ... In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. ... Silent E (sometimes described by teachers as a magic E) is a writing convention in English spelling: a silent letter e that appears at the end of a word. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ... Cognate (Latin: cognatus co+gnatus, ie. ...

Not all silent letters are completely redundant:

• Silent letters can distinguish between homophones, e.g. in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already familiar with both words.
• Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word, e.g. vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would.
• The final <fe> in giraffe gives a clue to the second-syllable stress, where giraf might suggest initial-stress.

Silent letters arise in several ways: Look up Homophone in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A curling tendril A vine is any plant of genus Vitis (the grape plants) or, by extension, any similar climbing or trailing plant. ...

• Pronunciation changes occurring without a spelling change. The <gh> spelling was in Old English pronounced [x] in such words as light.
• Sound distinctions from foreign languages may be lost, as with the distinction between smooth rho (ρ) and roughly aspirated rho (ῥ) in Ancient Greek, represented by <r> and <rh> in Latin, but merged to the same [r] in English. Similarly with <f> / <ph>, the latter from Greek phi.
• Clusters of consonants may be simplified, producing e.g. silent <th> in asthma, silent <d> in grandfather. Similarly with alien clusters such as Greek initial <ps> in psychology and <mn> in mnemonic.
• Occasionally, spurious letters are consciously inserted in spelling. The <b> in debt and doubt was inserted to reflect Latin cognates like debit and dubitable.

Since accent and pronunciation differ, letters may be silent for some speakers but not others. In non-rhotic accents, <r> is silent in such words as hard, feathered; in h-dropping accents, <h> is silent. A speaker may pronounce <t> in "often" or "tsunami" or neither or both. Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. ... Rho (upper case Ρ, lower case ρ) is the 17th letter of the Greek alphabet. ... Greek (, IPA: — Hellenic) has a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest of any single language within the Indo-European family. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... The letter phi Phi (upper case Φ or ; lower case φ, , or ), pronounced fee in Greek and fai as in defy in English, is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. ... // H-cluster reductions The h-cluster reductions are various consonant reductions that have occurred in the history of English involving consonant clusters beginning with /h/ that have lost the /h/ in certain dialects. ... English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and the non-rhotic, depending on when the letter r (equivalent to Greek rho) is pronounced. ... // H-cluster reductions The h-cluster reductions are various consonant clusters beginning with /h/ that have in the occurred in the history of English that have lost the /h/ in certain dialects. ...

See also

• Silent E
• Three letter rule source of some common English silent letters.
• List of names in English with non-intuitive pronunciations, many with multiple silent letters.

Silent E (sometimes described by teachers as a magic E) is a writing convention in English spelling: a silent letter e that appears at the end of a word. ... In English spelling, the three letter rule states that only function words may have fewer than three letters. ... This is a list of personal and place names that are pronounced in a way not easily deducible from the spelling or in a way at variance with a better known name of the same spelling. ...

References

• Carney, Edward (1994). A Survey of English Spelling. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-09270-1.  §2.6.5