In defence of silent letters

Marcel Berlins on changes in language (from the Guardian)

Recently the Portuguese government approved a reform of the country’s spelling, bringing much of it into line with the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, most significantly by eliminating a number of silent letters and introducing K, W and Y to the alphabet (which do not exist in native Portuguese words, only in foreign loan-words). Marcel Berlins, in today’s Guardian, thinks English could benefit from cutting out a load of our silent letters.

Those he cites include the P’s at the beginning of words like psychology and the B in doubt. He suggests that, if words were spelled more like the way they were pronounced, spelling would be that much less of a headache, particularly for those learning to write English. I am not convinced.

Some silent letters really are pointless - for example, the B in “doubt”, which allegedly only half of English 11-year-olds were found to be able to spell correctly in a recent survey according to Berlins’s article, was inserted into the word (formerly spelled “doute”) in the 19th century to better reflect its Latin roots. There has been an attitude among scholars in England that Latin and Greek words were superior to English ones, which resulted in their spelling being preserved even when it went against the rules of English spelling; real Latin-derived languages, like French and Italian, do not have this problem, adding accents and doubling and removing letters as the languages changed.

However, his examples of silent P’s at the beginnings of words are among the milder examples of allegedly pointless silent letters, because they are either consistent (as in the many words beginning psycho) or technical terms rarely used in conversation. Some silent letters distinguish the different meanings of words pronounced the same way (consider rite, write, right and wright, for example) and others are silent in some dialects but not others - the word white starts with an aspirated W in Scotland but a plain W in most of England. However, there are a “hard core” of commonly used but entirely unphonetical words, but surely it is not that difficult for most people to learn a relatively small number of words?

The comparison with the recent Portuguese reforms is not entirely appropriate, because the parliament there decided to accept the spellings used by the majority of those who speak Portuguese and the pronunciation of most of the rest, and so they are no doubt well understood by the population. The reforms of English suggested by Berlins would introduce ambiguity into the written language which may not be appropriate for the written word even if it has proven adequate for the spoken.

Besides, Marcel Berlins has, in the past, described his own native language, French, as “the most beautiful language in the world, the most elegant, expressive and mellifluous”, and it is notoriously full of silent consonants, manglings of vowel sounds and other bizarre spelling features. Perhaps they should do away with the numerous -er, -ez and -et endings, given that they are all prounounced é - and why not get rid of the ée feminine ending for good measure, since it’s pronounced the same way as the masculine? Surely children manage to learn these features of French, much as some of us do manage to learn to spell our English properly.

Possibly Related Posts:


Share

You may also like...