The Sound of Silence: What's Up With Silent Lettters?

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man, the myth, the legend, our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

The X is silent. The second X, that is.

Do you guys know this about the other Max Williams?

I don't know about the other Max Williams at all.

You're Max Prime, as far as I'm concerned.

For sure.

So there is a Max Williams who played in the NFL. Okay.

He has two X's instead of one X.

We have the same birthday.

What team does he play for?

He's out of the league now, I believe.

I think you mentioned this guy.

Well, Max, you may well know that when I refer to you often in our work-related missives, I often refer to you as Maximus with double X's.

So to me, the second X is... is silent.

That's more Max for your buck. Linguistically speaking, that's Mr. Noel Brown, the one and only. They called me Ben Bullen for several reasons. Guys, we are all language nerds here on Ridiculous History, so much so, in fact, that peek behind the curtain, bit of a breaking of the fourth wall, your pals Noel, Ben, and Lauren Vogelbaum have spent years scheming on making an etymology show.

That's the study of insects, right? That's very close.

It's entomology.

Damn it! You knew that.

I did.

I'm being coy. Ben, I got a question for you.

Yeah.

With the way I pronounce my name, Noel, isn't the E technically silent?

Yeah, kind of. It's an elided E.

If they call me Noel.

which people often do, and I don't really bother correcting them, then that would be a, what's the opposite of a silent E?

A heard E, a perceived E?

It's crazy, man. It's one of those. What are those old jokes? So a mnemonic I do to remember people's names is when I shake their hand while I'm holding their hand, I ask them to spell the name for me. You've seen me do this.

I've seen you look deeply into their eyes, and yeah. Is it Sarah with or without an H?

It's an intense exchange.

It's even weirder when he asks people to spell Ben to him.

Yes, spell it back to me.

That's the joke, you guys, because they asked me to spell my name, and that's fine. That's quid pro quo. And sometimes I'll say certain letters are silent. And that's what inspired our research associate Ames for today's episode, Noel. We often joke in this language, and sometimes we say it seriously, we often say that English is very difficult to learn because we have all sorts of tricky things like we have a sentence that is one word with different meanings. Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo. That's a real sentence. This language is ridiculous.

It is, Ben, and I will say this. I've seen recently, I want to say Japanese.

It happens in a lot of languages where there will be a word that sounds the same but is spelled slightly differently, and you can basically say a whole sentence with the same word.

Like multiple times. And that becomes the joke of the TikTok. Yeah.

And it gets funny too and tricky in tonal languages. Like in Mandarin, I remember, there's a poem called something like the stone lion. And it's the same sound, just with different intonations. And it's kind of a long poem. But also, you know, we have run into this repeatedly, Noel, throughout our young lives. Questions like, Why are, to your point, read and read spelled the same? There's no way to tell other than context clues. Why are our grammar rules as messy as a drunk jazz band?

Ooh, I love a drunk jazz band.

Maybe they're also smoking some jazz cigarettes while they're at it. Ben, it also reminds me of the quandary of learning German. as a non-native speaker, where the gender of words changes and oftentimes has nothing to do with the perceived gender of the word itself. It's something that you ultimately have to memorize along with the word.

Yeah, yeah.

And that happens in Latin languages as well as Germanic languages. Another plot twist, another little Shyamalan for all our English speakers.

Shyamalan Madigna.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And folks like me and you, Noel, who are still learning English, another plot twist is the idea of the infamous silent letter. I mean, why would you, no offense to our French compadres, but why would you have a bunch of letters in a word if they are not pronounced?

It's a good question and one that I hope that we get to the bottom of in this episode. I got to say, Ben, when I first read the topic, when AIM submitted this brief, I thought there was some phenomenon of like wordless correspondence, silent letters, like using invisible ink or something.

I don't know. Secret code? That's not the case.

So the silent letter is one of the many mysterious parts of language, not just the English language.

We are going to mainly stick to the English language.

Today that seems specifically designed to, you know, confuse people, perplex people, and potentially make us lose our childhood spelling bees.

Ben, were you a childhood spelling bee competitor?

I was.

Yeah. How'd you do?

I did all right. I did all right, but then I— At the risk of sounding too cool for school, the issue was.

Ben, you're in the spelling bee. You had no risk of being too cool for school. Thank you. Thank you, guys.

The issue was, you know, it's all about rote memorization. A lot of it is, for sure. And then clever figuring out of context clues. But you're not. It's not the same as learning literature.

I'm going to need you to use that word in a sentence because that's clearly going to help. Well, you know what? I'm joking.

But based on what we're talking about today, that could absolutely inform because context can make a huge difference in deciding whether or not a word has a silent letter or not.

Yeah, and the etymology, too, if you know something has Germanic roots or if you know it comes from Latin— then that'll help you kind of suss out how the pieces of the word fit together. And Noel, we had Max pop on real quick.

He did pop and then he popped right on out.

There's something burning in your head about a spelling bee.

Pop on back, man.

Oh, no, this is going to give you my take on that. I think I competed in like one spelling bee and I knew how to spell the word. But my stage fright that I had in elementary school was so much that I accidentally misspelled the word.

It was a very easy. And then I decided to do theater.

There you go. Which has nothing to do with stage fright. Somehow. I'm confused about this juxtaposition. I think I made it to like.

The version of the spelling bee where I got to compete on stage in my local elementary school, but I did not advance any further. But I did advance to the semifinals of a Blockbuster Video-hosted NBA Jam tournament.

Hey, he's on fire. And English is on fire as well. Just to rip the Band-Aid off here, folks. A lot of different cultures will tell you that their language is the most difficult to learn. It's a little bit self-centered when you hear that, but it turns out that a lot of languages outside of things like Esperanto and Toki Pona are actually pretty difficult to acquire fluency in. And a lot of languages, to your point, Noel, they do include silent letters. This is one of my favorite facts that Ames found. roughly 60% of English words include some silent letter.

Dang, that's a lot. That's most of them. I had no idea.

Cambridge, the dictionary wing of Cambridge, describes or defines a silent letter as a letter in a word that is written but not pronounced, such as B in doubt.

Or a lot of the letters in enough.

Mm-hmm, true.

The what of it all does seem a little simple when you just look at that relatively straightforward definition, but it is the sometimes why, which is a literacy joke, that makes things a little more complex and, dare we say, convoluted and, dare we further say, ridiculous. So why don't we travel back to the Middle Ages and something called the Great Vowel Shift, right?

Yes, and on the way, we're also going to have to talk about how English is kind of a pirate language.

Boy, is it ever. A lot of borrowing.

Yeah, it acquires a lot of stuff from other parts of the world and other tongues. So Britannica says, in historical linguistics, great vowel shift is a series of significant and parallel changes in the articulation of long vowels in English words. in particular, so vowels whose articulations are stressed and relatively longer than those of most other vowels. This shift occurs from the 15th to the 18th century. It's the big demarcation line between what we call middle English and early modern English.

Right, middle English being like, whoop-de-whoop-de-whoop-de-pooh, you know what I mean?

Right, and modern English being a little more blunt and aggressive.

Yeah, yeah, it's like, imagine reading the Canterbury Tales uh, through Brooklyn dialect.

Which I would watch. It's a fun thing to do. Yeah. Now the, the spelling, it really does kind of put, do your head in a little bit. Some of the spellings.

It brings us, it brings us to, I think our mutual favorite word for this episode.

It's so silly. Of course it's, it's a diphthong. Yeah. Yeah. And not even, let's take it a step further. Yeah. Diphthongization.

Right.

Uh, This is the process that occurred during the great vowel shift. I love how English has so many specific words. German's a little better at it, but English has so many words that you will just never use. Diphthongization, as you were saying, Noel, is a gliding monosyllabic speech sound like the vowel combination at the end of toy or the, I would say, the O-E inside your name. It starts at or near the articulatory position for one vowel. And soon as you know it, it moves toward the position of the other vowel.

It's that dip thong for thong, thong, thong. Not to be confused with Cisco's famed work on the thong song.

His episode of Cribs was so weird.

He's an interesting cat. Did he have his head spray painted silver in that episode?

I think he was, I think he had a, don't quote me on this, but I think he had a yellowish or blonde wife at that time. Uh, Yeah, he just had he had a very strange moment on Cribs when he was talking about his bidet.

Oh, well, you know what?

He was ahead of the curve when it comes to bidets because, well, I don't know. We're still a little behind the curve when it comes to bidets. But I think you and I are both both fans from way back, but not as far back as Cisco. And I'm sure he had some very specific reasons that he enjoyed.

He goes into detail. I bet he does.

He uses a lot of diphthongs and a lot of close vowels. Noel, what is a close vowel?

Well, we were talking about referring to a language as a tongue, of course. And that is because you got to use that thing to make sounds with your mouth.

And it became a little bit, I don't know if this is like, it almost makes me, not evolutionarily, but like what caused this? It's very interesting.

The defining characteristic with closed vowel is this idea of the tongue being positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth, as close rather as it can be without creating a constriction. Constriction would produce a sound that would be classified as a consonant or a hard K type sound. An example of diphthongization in action is the word meet, which was originally pronounced Meat.

Meat.

Free thee thou meat.

Yes, exactly. Then evolves.

So I guess it's not really a physical evolution, but it's just more of an evolution of the way sounds are created to the current pronunciation meat. Our tongues gradually over time began to move higher in the mouth, which changed the way that certain vowels were pronounced.

Yeah.

And folks, you can play along at home. So creep everybody out. who is not hearing this because you're listening on headphones, play along as we say this. Some vowels are pronounced with your tongue high, like the vowel in C. Do you feel where your tongue is?

Say it, C. There it is.

Yeah, it is kind of involuntarily, like right there on the tip of the roof of the mouth.

We don't think about it, right? And others, other vowels are pronounced lower, like the vowel in O. Father. So C, our tongue is high. Father, our tongue is lower. And that's, I'm influencing it a little bit with my tone. Max, what you got?

Oh, I'm just over here doing it, but on my mic silent.

Practicing.

So, all right.

Father.

See, you feel it?

Yeah, it's weird.

Yeah, during the, and we've just gotten into your heads, folks, during the great vowel shift. Those long vowels gradually moved upward in this positional scale. When a vowel reached the top and could not move any higher, that's when it changed into a diphthong. That's the sound that glides between two vowels, like piano or knoll.

And this comes from a nice blog entry, The Great Vowel Shift When English Vowels Quietly Moved by Matthew Weinberg.

Some good writing on this blog. ProfessorMatthew, M-A-T-T-W dot com. Yeah, yeah.

And that's a great shout out because it leads us to another mystery. Even the experts like Professor Weinberg are not sure why the great vowel shift happened. There's a ton of debate on the exact timeline, which is why our window from the 15th to the 18th century is so wide. But the fact remains that English pronunciation did change.

And in that change, we also see the arrival of many silent letters.

Yeah, exactly.

Think of the word bite, for example, pre great vowel shift. It was pronounced again, like a beat, a beat. We always do that little voice when we do.

I don't know why we act like everybody.

Yeah.

That part of history, we act like every one of them had, had a wheezy reedy voice.

And likely suffered from hemophilia and very pale, very pale people back.

In those days. They were pale punch. At least in our recreation of it. But yeah, beat.

So that effectively touched every single letter in the word as opposed to that sort of gliding that we're talking about. Post great vowel shift, we pronounce the word like bite. So we sort of combine some sounds.

Yeah, yeah.

And the E persists. despite the fact that you don't really need it.

Sometimes these E's or these silent letters are just kind of historical hangers-on.

They're artifacts that legacy hires, right? Because the spoken language, all languages are living technology. The spoken language was evolving due to all sorts of factors, but the written word was much slower on the uptake.

And we do often talk about how legislation often lags behind technology. Not that this is a direct one-to-one, but we do need to remember that language is.

A form of technology and it often has to kind of catch up with the times.

That's a great point, Noel. And it's also, so we have the great vowel shift. That definitely gave you some of the silent words that ruined your spelling bee, but that's not the only culprit involved. We have to go back to the point we teased earlier So many words in modern English have been borrowed from other languages, from people who were in the area in the times before or contemporaneously. French, Latin, Greek kept the original spelling. They have no corresponding letter in English for the way they were pronounced in their native tongue. Like the Greek letter Rho, R-H-O.

It's R or R-H in Latin. It gets merged as a simple R in English, and it leads to crazy spellings like arrhythmic.

For sure, which is one I always have to check myself on. Rhythm and arrhythmic, I always mess it up. There's a letter in there that I always leave out. Psi, for example, from Greek, has been kind of truncated into just the letter P. And S, such as in the word psychology. So one sound now becomes two.

Yeah, and throw a Y in there, because why not?

Why not?

And then, of course, you've got classic hits like Tsunami, which starts with a T because it's a Japanese word, and in Japanese language, you have a different set of sounds, right, and a different set of vowels. Psychology, of course, comes from Greek. The consonant combinations in Tsunami and in Psychology are They're not used to start basic words in English.

And as a result, the first letters become silent so that tsunami and psychology can blend in with the rest of the nomenclature crowd.

Shout out to the real reason some English words have silent letters by Claire Nowak.

Maybe it's Novak. I'm just going to say it's a W. Maybe the K is silent. I don't think it is. From Reader's Digest, a trusted friend in a complicated world, which is a great.

Tagline. There was also this moment in history where English had a huge chip on its shoulders because English was thought to be, for very long time, a vulgar common tongue. It was not the fancy, the fancy language of the learned reading and speaking Latin and Greek. So people who wanted to be on the up and up in society would study Latin and Greek in school. They'd study the classics, but the issue was not everybody was able to afford to go to a fancy school and And as literacy became more popular, people wanted to read books in the language they spoke and understood. So they wanted more stuff in English.

The common tongue, right? The common tongue.

Yeah, because it makes sense because, I mean, Latin and Greek could maybe be considered more pure languages, you know, whereas to your point, Ben, English is sort of like a hodgepodge melting pot.

So there is a certain amount of, I don't know, Not quite xenophobia wrapped up in this distinction, but something along those lines.

Yeah, and shout out to Erika Okrent over at the History News Network who points out that authors who are trying to make a living and always trying to get their stuff read, they said, okay, I will write in English because I can sell more stuff that way, but I am going to write a disclaimer, essentially, at the top of my book to explain why I am writing in English, and I will apologize, as one translation put it, for our gross tongue is a rude and barren tongue.

You know what a term I really enjoy for languages like ours? I think it's often used specifically to refer to English, but a bastard tongue.

Yes, yeah.

Which refers to, it's an informal kind of colloquialism to describe a language that contains mixed, you know, borrowed or heavily influenced words and syntax from other languages rather than evolving in isolation. But as we know, Ben, not much evolves in isolation, you know, over time.

Not even the folks at North Sentinel Island. And if you're listening, thanks for tuning in. Explain to us how you got a podcast. So also writers being a somewhat high-nosed insecure bunch.

Their noses and their brows are both high tie.

Yeah, high brow, high nose. I love it. They wanted to make their work look legitimate, look, in other words, fancy. So they would borrow words from Latin. They would do that thing that James Joyce does later where they would smash Latin words together, higgledy-piggledy. These would become what we call inkhorn terms. This is one of the roots of the weirdly specific words we were mentioning earlier. They are derived from Latin or Greek. They're kind of freestyled or jazzed upon, and they are used much more. Jazzed upon?

Yeah.

They're used much more in writing than in speech. That's from encyclopedia.com, and sometimes these authors would even add extra letters to words they stole from French. to make it seem more impressive, basically. That's why we mentioned doubt, the word doubt, or the word debt. Why is there a B there?

Why? Why?

Why? The authors who popularized those words in specific or those spellings put the B in there because they wanted people to know they knew the Latin etymology. They knew that debt comes from debitum and doubt comes from dubitare. And so they were like, I'm going to put a B in there. So everybody knows that even if I'm writing in English, your boy's aware of Latin. It's just, it's a weird cell phone, I think. But it also didn't seem to be important to these authors and these early writers to whether or not the Latin origins were true.

For example, there's this historical evidence of people attempting to force this crossover without much backing to support their ideas or their new spin on words. Like the word island, I-S-L-A-N-D, it comes from an old English word, igland. Just replace the S with a G, but it gained an S because there was this incorrect notion that if you added the S, it would hearken back to the Latin word insula, and then everybody reading would be like, holy smokes, this guy writes in English, but he definitely knows Latin. He probably didn't, because there's no relationship between those words.

That's right.

And some of these silent letters actually stuck around, like the P in receipt, for example, while others eventually were, you know, dropped, as is the case with the word deceit.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Deceit. Receipts? Deceit. Yeah. D-E-C-E-I-T. I imagine it used to have a E-I-P-T.

Yeah.

Which is funny because then there's the deception, of course.

Yep.

Exactly. It does add a P in.

What a messy bowl of spaghetti. Really beautiful language of ours. So this comes into this comes into sharp relief with the invention of the printing press, because before we had mass printed media, people just kind of freestyled on how word was spelled. And most people were not writing stuff down. They were talking to each other. They were hearing each other.

So The emphasis was on oral communication. Get your point across that. The oral tradition.

Yeah.

So there's no single correct spelling. That's why if you are a student in high school or in your English courses in undergrad and you're looking at very old instances of English canon, you're going to see a lot of crazy spelling, like physic. I think we both love physic from early medical text where they were just throwing Ks left and right. You can see a word in multiple forms because writing was done by hand, usually in monasteries, and they were doing their best to reflect on the page the way people spoke around them. So if somebody had an accent in Northumbria and the monk there was writing down what they said, It would be possibly very different from the monastery over in Wessex, who would be

spelling it the way they heard it.

Well, it's fascinating, man, because sometimes it goes in the opposite direction.

Whereas, you know, with physic, for example, we have turned it into physics, adding an S. Whereas over here in the U.S., we say math, but in the U.K., they say maths.

Yeah. They mean the same thing.

They're both, you know, a study of, you know, numbers, whereas physic referred to– oftentimes it would refer to medicine as well, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes.

Like in the olden times. But it kind of evolved to refer to a more high study of mathematics and its place in the universe and, you know, various other elements that, you know, the movement of the planets and things like that. It evolved, of course, but sometimes you'll have these historical remnants kind of stick around or get transposed.

There's a really great piece that Ames linked us to on wordstrivia.com, Why English Spelling Got Frozen in Time, The History Behind Silent Letters. And they put it really well, I think, saying that silent letters are not random mistakes. They are historical leftovers. They show where English has been, who influenced it, and how spelling became frozen while speech kept moving.

There we go, summing it up really well. And here at this point in history, we enter a slow motion crowdsourcing phenomenon because you've got people spelling words three, four different ways, cats and dogs sleeping together, pandemonium on the page. So we have to decide how to codify and uniformize some of this stuff. Some spellings just end up being more popular than others. They make more sense to the most people. and they become the default as a result.

And then also a lot of writers back in the day are their own biggest audience. So they're writing for other writers, and they all love a fancy pants word. So those are the spellings that often end up in print and therefore become the law of the lands. But Noel, I think at this point, you and Max and I are Just going to accept silent letters. I remember reading some madcap experiments over the centuries from people who wanted to improve the language by cutting out the letters. Remember when Ben Franklin got his britches up and said he was going to fix the alphabet? by removing certain letters.

That didn't really take. Some of his stuff did, but not all ideas are bangers. I want to get back to physics for a second because it's a really good example of how some silent letters can really differentiate between two similar sounding words and what they actually refer to. They can also help identify which syllables should be emphasized in a particular word, not to mention their different definitions. Physics, of course, P-H-Y-S-I-C-S versus physiques.

Physics being the study.

Of, you know, what I was mentioning earlier, mathematics and the heavens and all of that stuff, celestial bodies.

I know I'm way simplifying the concept of physics. It's close enough. It's perfect. Physiques, of course, refers to you know, your physical body and it's kind of makeup or level of physical fitness, sort of like if you have a good physique or, you know, a shabby physique.

Yeah. When we usually use physics physique, excuse me, in modern English, it has a positive connotation. You don't see too many people saying, and he.

Had a horrid physique, but that'd be cool.

I'm going to write that down. We should use that later. We also know that silent letters help us as speakers and readers to navigate the vast labyrinthine chasm of homophones, words that sound alike but have wildly different meanings. So right versus right. That's confusing if you hear it on a purely audio or oral format, but if you read it and you see that one of those pronunciations has W-R-I-T-E and the other has R-I-G-H-T, then that helps you immensely.

Ben, remind me what a homonym is versus a homophone.

So a homophone is like right or right, two very different words that can be spelled differently but sound the same. A homonym is a word that has the same spelling or the same pronunciation or both as another word but as a completely different meaning. So read and read means Could be homonyms.

Oh, exactly. Close and close. Thank you for.

Reminding me of my elementary school education.

It's all coming back to me now. But I would argue that homonyms are extra confusing for people who do not speak the language natively. At least homophones, like if you're reading it, it's pretty clear that these are different words. Yeah.

I'll always remember one of my old professors who lives in Japan now, he's a native Japanese speaker. He had this hilarious moment where we were kind of in our cups, to be honest, and he was breaking down how he thought English was, beat me here, Max, bullshit. And his first piece of evidence was that he thought bullshit was a weird word. Thank you, Max. And then he said, you know, think about the word close. I'm close to the store to close the deal before the store closes.

And he was like, how do you people walk around talking that way?

Oh, that's a great example.

But like I said, Ben, that happens in other languages, too. So I think he might have been barking up the wrong acorn a little bit there.

Barking up the wrong acorn.

Yeah, I didn't make that up. That's a Matt Berry-ism, who is, I would argue, a master of the English language. But silent letters also have the ability to evoke etymological connections. Like vineyard connects back to the vine. Sorry, vineyard is how it would be pronounced, but it's spelled V-I-N-E-Y-A-R-D. You would think you would maybe pronounce it vineyard, but it's vineyard.

As opposed to spelling it V-I-N-Y-A-R-D because it connects it back to the vine.

Yeah, it's a nice little reminder. And, folks, we are such fans of odd things. of odd nooks and crannies of linguistics, and we wish we could keep continuing. So we may have more episodes like this in the future, but we want to end on obviously a positive note. We are not picking on English. It's just the one we happen to be currently learning. Tons of other languages, like you said, don't have silent letters, you know, Hebrew has a very interesting relationship with vowels. Spanish, Italian, Arabic, French, they all have silent letters, as do Indic languages. Finnish is kind of an outlier because it's mainly phonetic, and you pronounce each letter according to, quote, its value.

Those practical Finns.

Dude, I remember I was talking with a Finnish friend, and I was trying to impress her by learning some Finnish phrases. And she looked at me dead in the face and just said, don't bother. Stop, man. Don't bother.

Learn. Just speak English. Speak English, bro. Yeah. Leave it at that. This is a good one. Yeah. Huge thanks to Ames for this one.

And we're so stoked to have a handful of amazing new research associates helping us out.

On Ridiculous History. So, yeah, I do think we might ask for some more of these linguistically based episodes.

Absolutely. And big, big thanks as well to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a. The Quister. I know I drag him pretty often. And Jonathan, I know you only tune in to hear your name mentioned in the credits, but credit where it is due. Jonathan is no slouch in the language nerddom himself. He's a pretty good orator.

No, if anything, that's like one of his evil superpowers.

Yes, yes.

Big thanks to A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, a.k.a. The Puzzler, The Rude Dudes at Ridiculous Crime, and who else, who else?

Oh, well, of course, Christopher Asiotis and Yves Jeffcoats here in spirit, Alex Williams, who composed this theme, and super producer Max the Silent X Williams.

And big thanks to you, Noel.

And to you as well, sir.

I'm getting Noel.

I know, it's cool. That would aggravate me if I were you. No, it's fine. I'll answer to whatever you call me. We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

The Sound of Silence: What's Up With Silent Lettters?

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin