Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Silent Letters in English

English has many silent letters. They often reflect an older pronunciation of the language. Here is a list of words with silent letters:

autumn
calm
castle
doubt
guard
honest
hope
island
sword
thumb

Silent letters are very common in English. As the list illustrates, many letters can be silent in different words. Many words such as hope have a silent e at the end of a word. In this case the e is a diacritic letter. It is silent, but it also changes the sound of the preceding vowel. In the word hop the vowel quality is different.

No comments:

Featured Post

Finding the Proto-Form

Related languages have a number of words which are similar to one another. In the branch of linguistics known as historical linguistics, the...