Why are there silent letters in English words? - Big Questions - (Ep. 42)
Vložit
- čas přidán 9. 08. 2015
- A weekly show where we endeavor to answer one of your big questions. This week, morgana7544 asks, "Why are there silent letters in English words?"
--
Mental Floss Video on Twitter: / mf_video
Select Images and Footage provided by Shutterstock: www.shutterstock.com
Want more of Craig?
/ wheezywaiter
/ thegoodstuff
----
Website: www.mentalfloss.com
Twitter: / mental_floss
Facebook: / mentalflossma. .
Store: store.mentalfloss.com/ (enter promo code: "CZcamsFlossers" for 15% off!)
Whoever added the b in subtle deserves an award
False! It's because English secretly wants to overtake French in who has the worse spelling system!
HelenaeCat You're more right than it might at first appear. A lot of the changes to English spelling come by way of French, thanks to William the Conqueror. Prior to 1066, English had developed in such a way that every letter made a specific sound. For instance, you had words like 'cwen' and 'cwic', up until the French convinced the scribes to change to 'queen' and 'quick'.
HelenaeCat If you really think about it, French is the mastermind of silent letters, so it wouldn't be too farfetched to think that.
+likenem Yes, french is far worse! Like the French word beaucoup is pronounced bo-coo.
faeriegardener84
Dove can be pronounced two different ways and mean two different things. I Dove(Bird) dove(dived) after its prey. Top that.
likenem It's the interaction between them that really gets terrible. For instance, siege and seize are French in origin, and in French, are pronounced differently. When they moved into English, the different spellings came along, but the different pronunciations didn't.
So, the taunting French guy was correct! "You silly English Kah-nigit!"
Curtis Gibb My thoughts exactly!
Curtis Gibb Some of the funniest jokes in both Holy Grail and Life of Brian are stuff that is actually true about their respective time periods but that other such films don't cover.
Your mother was a hamster, and you father smelt of elderberries!!!!
Frank Lein Now go away before i taunt you another time!
Jon Stamos Isn't it "Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time?"
This is probably one of the most interesting episodes so far
I've never laughed out loud during a Mental Floss video, but the first 2 seconds of this one had me in tears.
It's pretty fun being able to speak two languages related to eachother. For me it's Swedish and English. since both languages are related we can find some fun similarities that have changed through history.
Example, the Swedish word for knife is 'kniv' where the k is vocal. Making the k vocal in knife and dropping the e, they become really similar!
Same goes for knight, which in Swedish becomes knäkt. If you can pronounce ä it becomes pretty easy to see how similar the two words really are (if you also make the k vocal in knight)
I always enjoy the language-oriented videos, this one was fun, and I learned a couple things!
My first language is French and although I knew about silent letters, we do have them in French too, I now realize that I have been pronouncing some English words wrong. I've even been hearing those words wrong because my vocabulary mostly come from reading and my brain substitutes what I think some words should sounds like instead of what they actually sounds like.
When I read your language, I consider it " drunk latin " due to silent letters, but the purpose of yours is to help avoid homophones, in my mother tongue. We should purge PH, Y from EVER being a substitution of Greek, if my mother tongue had accent marks to replace SILENT letters that used to exist like le circonflexe! In opistal, it would make our lives easier.
Thanks for answering my question!
Thanks for the Video Pcraig
"Psychology" and "asthma" actually have pronunciations because English has constraints on what consonant clusters are allowed and which aren't. So in Greek, "ps" is an allowed consonant cluster, and Greek speakers pronounce both, but in English, "ps" is not an allowed cluster, nor is "sth," so when we first borrowed these words, we spoke them with an accent, i.e. trying to pronounce the words as close to correct as possible without violating any of our constraints. After time, as the words became standard English words rather than simple borrowings, the pronunciations stuck, and thus we have the silent letters.
Why does getting your back scratched feel so good?
The basic answer is that it caught on. All of the words you know and love are there because of popularity. There's not a shadowy cabal of people who decide how to spell words, but rather a body of researchers called lexicographers that study how often the ordinary person uses words (via magazines, letters, novels, etc) and then document those how-oftens. The most popular ways stick, and the dictionary is basically a list of the most popular ways observed -- not a limitation on how they're allowed to be spelled, but simply most frequently observed to be spelled that way. Sometimes a group like the scholars mentioned at 2:05 will try to force people to try to spell things a certain way as a status symbol or an impression of what should be correct, but it ultimately boils down to whether it simply catches on and becomes popular enough, regardless of who said it should be spelled that way.
When all the letters in knight is pronounced, it sounds a bit more like the Swedish word (knekt) and you can easily see the Germanic connections :)
English is like: "Spell it 'queue' but it's sounds like 'Q' HAHA!"
Why are dimes smaller than nickles if they're worth more money? (Pennies being around the same size as dimes and quarters being worth the most and the largest of the more commonly used coins in the US).
why do i get more tired if i sleep to much?
Why are you asking this here? BTW I have the answer.
I will never forget when I missed a day of elementary school so I didn't know some of the new words they learned. When I came back we had to read in front of the class and I pronounced island as is-land and the teacher corrected me. I don't really know why I remember this specifically, maybe because I was always such a smooth reader when I read in front of the class and always took pride in never messing up or having the teacher correct me. I made sure to keep up with my work after that lol (sorry I ramble)
English used to have a lot more/different sounds, too, and some spellings reflect past efforts to write these down. At some point the "gh" sound, for example, indicated a sound that's still present in modern day German and Scandinavian languages, a sort of hiss like a cat would make.
If you keep that in mind, the older pronunciation of "knight" reveals its kinship with German "Knecht", which can be a sort of vassal or servant, or a mercenary. The word took on a derogatory meaning in German, whereas in English, it acquired more positive connotations.
Language economy - the tendency of speech to say as many things with as little possible material (letters) - also plays a role. In Slavic languages circumflexes came to be as a way to use less letters for a sound. Example: english sh, German sch, Slovene š. :)
nice video pcraig.
What makes a food appeal to your taste buds?
Generally what you had a lot of when you were growing up, or things that subconsciously remind you of it.
Nathan Becker its personality
Evolution conditioned is to enjoy high-energy foods because in the wild, energy was the most important thing in a meal. It also conditioned us to be grossed out by some things like rotten food because those were more likely no make us sick.
Hypersonic Gaming That's only generally though as a species, what about on an individual level?
*****
Oh, right. My conjecture would be hormones, chemical tolerance levels, and how the food is first presented to you. Genetics most likely have a small hand in it, as well.
Why do we say "mmbye" instead of "bye" at the end of phone calls?
Craig is so awesome~ (:
Please start putting the links in the more info area
How about why English is weird in general. Rough, through and cough don't rhyme. Kernel and colonel are pronounced the same. Why are there rules when few words actually follow them?
Prince Dadey: The 'ough' in cough sounds like 'off' and the 'ough' in rough is pronounced 'uff'.
Nali Singh Because English is a Pidgin language, a mixture of languages. It started as a mix of Norman French and Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language. So you are starting off with a rather mismatched language already, and then add in the huge amount of loan words that English aquirred throughout the centuries from mingling with the rest of the world. The reason it's so weird is its just a mismatch from a whole bunch of languages.
Nali Singh You could just google this shit
Edit: She deleted her comment but the stunning follow-up was "Who invented the alphabet?"
Nali Singh you mean like how read and lead rhyme and so does read and lead; but lead and read don't?
Todd Koons You just gave me a headache...
Why are the keys of the keyboards arranged the way that they are? The alphabet is not arranged in a specific order, but are the keys on the keyboard arranged in a specific way?
these silent letters made me very mad that i hated english very much and i was so much confused....silent letters makes english very complicated to learn....i struggled so much😐😐
Yay
Notice the way they spelled Craig? "Crapig"
Nice
Anyone else notice his name was displayed as Crapig at the beginning? Awesome.
Lol, "The P is silent" "Crapig". xD
Why is the lowercase letter 'a' written by hand different from the one we type on the computer?
So to sum up, historical elision and due to economy of effort. For me the most awkward kind of elision is the /l/ in only. And the /k/ in asked and risked. Though, those cases are rare. Thank god.
I blame Craig for it being so cold today! I'm trying to work and it's freezing, my fingers feel numb!
aaroNiGHTS Maybe it was Mad Scientist Clone
My teacher told me that with some typewriters multiple spacing wasn't an option, so they would put random silent letters in words so that they'd take up enough room to move onto the next line.
Why is the Sky blue? I've heard it has to do something with the light spectrum but I dont know for sure
Fine
Why do things like cloth and rocks get darker when they get wet?
Where did the 60% stat come from in the beginning?
What was the first (recorded) language in the world?
How long is a hop, skip, and a jump?
Whoa... never seen a video so soon after uploading
BIG QUESTION IDEA!!!
Why does the metric system use metric tones instead of megagrams??? Mega (meaning million) refers to 1 million grams while a metric tone is 1000 kiliograms (meaning thousand, 1000*1000=1000000) or 1 million grams. If we use the "Mega" prefix for thigs like megatones, megajoules, megahertz, megawatts, and megabytes, why don't we use megagrams in place of metric tones????
I would absolutely love it if you could make this a "Big Question" question, it would make my day! Anyway thanks for all the great content and have a nice day!
Ps.
Also if at all possible, could you put the upper part of the comment, with my name in the video or in the doobly doo, just so that I can prove it was my idea to some friends! Thanks!
What is the luminosity of the bat signal?
I could only watch 2 minutes of this before i realized that i own the same shirt that your wearing and couldn't concentrate on what you were saying anymore lol
What is the correct was to pronounce February? I saw Feb-ru-ary, however most of my friends say Feb-u-ary.
How do voice boxes work?
Neighbour, labour, etc.. What is the term for double letters in a word? "Bookkeeper" comes to mind. I once heard a term for it but can't remember...
My big question is why does some stuff hurt badly in one part of you foot for example but the other side it doesn't hurt?
Where does the term thumbnail come from
where do freckle come from?
I have a question: Why is the letter „R” pronounced differently in various languages?
Just in case anyone was wondering, the 'T' in tsunami isn't silent. You pronounce the T and S together
"Knight" is just very close to "German" Knecht, so it was pronounced indeed ;)
It's worth mentioning that a lot of the silent "g"s you find are due to the elimination of the guttural sounds other Germanic languages still use. Listen to a native Dutch or Swedish speaker and you can hear what they're supposed to be. Or, better yet, look for the true Dutch pronunciation of Vincent Van Gogh on youtube, it's a classic example of the sounds English has dropped throughout its evolutionary divergence from other Germanic languages. Finding the pronunciation of Gyllenhaal (actors) and Leeuwenhoek (father of microscopy) can be interesting examples of how sounds and spellings can vary from one language to another.
Crapig was always my favorite
Also it had to do with bad hand writing and ink. Remember that before the printing press, books had to be written by hand and those books wore and tore over time. When these book had to rewritten, those writers might had to guess the spelling thru the smudges.
French Scribes be like when writing English.
How much hard-drive space could a modern computer index and use?
I WAS HAVING THIS PROBLEM WITH PSEUDONYM THE OTHER DAY.
The old pronunciation of knight had the gh pronounced as the ch in loch.
Could you make a video talking about amnesia?
How does toothpaste remain striped when you've put it on your toothbrush?
Does immortality exist?
What kind of silent letter is it when we add an E to the end of a word to change the previous vowel (e.g. cub > cube, man > mane)?
SilentBudgie It's called a modifier E.
It is just one more puzzling aspect of the "mother tongue" that makes English so hard to learn.. (Why is "ear" pronounced "uhr" here?) Seems like the most needed skill for students of English is how to deal with the maddening, overwhelming frustration when encountering YET ANOTHER EXCEPTION.
How do you get rid of fungus. Like athletes foot, fungal infection, etc.
I suggest a visit to the doctor. Just my opinion, though.
Why have onions stopped burning our eyes when cut?
Question: does it rain in the ocean? Like deep into de ocean
No but yes😃😃😃
Can i ask about Mr.BeerBong at 0:16?
Wheezy, the 'ng' in "king" is like *_both_* of the letters. it's a nasal, like /n/ pronounced roughly where /g/ is pronounced.
Another great Mental Floss video from Vsauce. Must say, he's really getting quite good at it.
Craig=\= Michael.
queue
or just q because why write 80% of a word you're not gonna pronounce
whoeveriam0iam14222 I had a lecturer at uni who pronounced "queue" as "kyew-ee". Though, in his defence, English wasn't his first language, and what he used does seem like a reasonable guess based on the spelling of the word.
***** I did the same when learning English.. that word makes no sense
Mr. Rich B.O.B Rare though it is, here in the Midwest, it's definitely always "kyu."
Mr. Rich B.O.B I believe it's "Status Quo" not "Status Queue". I always pronounce queue just like the letter Q.
why are Chinese (not sure if Mandarin or Cantonese or both) words spelled with a roman "X" make a "Shwa" sound?
Because english is not a well developed language and it is impossible to write some words in it. Those words you are talking about have special alphabets in their language and I know it because I know few languages and it is sometimes impossible to to chat in english while using other languages. For example बुट and बूट are different words now try to write them in english. You can use Google translate if you want
Good explanation, but left out some history. The example with knight for example, is not entirely down to "it used to be pronounced like that" but more it's origin in knecht, which means servant. Footsoldier is Landsknecht, but e.g. in swedish it is just knekt (soldier).
So yeah, you cold argue that knight used to be pronounced as written, but that was as a germanic word =)
Grammar Girl has a much more in depth look at the same subject on a recent podcast. Look it up if you're interested in how weird English can be!
what about the gh in laugh?
whats up with island ??? why not ieland
Does water go to your stomach when you drink it? If so, how does it not react with the stomach acid?
OptimusPhillip This might help
qurewater.com/main/faqs/item/116-how-does-alkaline-water-react-to-stomach-acid/116-how-does-alkaline-water-react-to-stomach-acid
Why do we gasp when we are surprised?
Why don't condiment packets have expiration dates? How long do they last?!
Two things,
1) rather than pronunciation changes not followed by spelling changes almost all extraneous vowels in English come from regional dialects. In the early middle ages southern England was the cultural and political center of the English speaking world. They had all the scholars writing in English. The north was important too, but they prefered Lantin. However, the midlands was the major population center in England. The south had more Saxon influences and the midlands had more Celtic and Anglian influences. So spelling reflects the southern dialect and pronunciation reflects the midlands dialect.
2) Some of the more confusing spellings reflect sounds that no longer exist in English. Though, cough, thought, and knight all reflect this. Specifical the silent gh was never g sound, it was a sort of hissing in the back of the throat. Like in the modern German word nacht (google translate will pronounce it for you).
what about gnome?
Crapig Benzine - Host/Silently judging you. Best ever.
Why is the pillow always cooler on the other side?
How do fans works??
But then why is Versailles "versai"?
Why does the clock start at 12 and not 1?
Various early civilizations used base 12 and base 60.
2:13 the final 'e' on Latin 'dubitare' is not an auxiliary silent letter!
Why do we use a base 10 instead of any other base number for counting?
fingers
And it has been found to be versatile.
Who invented the cubicle?
What category does the P in Pterodactyl fall in?
Jack Craig I guess empty
Jack Craig I pronounce the P though.
what is with your cut away giraffe?
Why do some great britian people add the "R" sound in words like lava? So it sounds like la-ver?
I feel like Craig kept looking over my shoulder the whole time
I'm still as confused as the second I started watching this damn video. "Why don't you explain it to me like I'm 5"
-Michael Scott
Why do certain foods taste better hot and others cold?
I love chocolate covered consonant clusters!
Why is the word "pig" considered derogatory to a police officer? What are its origins?
60% ???
Of the 26 letters of the English alphabet how many are silent in an English word? .