Repost: Dr Bate, “The Silence of the Letters”
On a recent drive I was listening to an episode of Mignon Fogarty’s epic podcast Grammar Girl, where she spoke with linguist, writer, and broadcaster Dr. Danny Bate. He was there to discuss his new book Why Q Needs U?, but spent much of the time exploring the history of English spelling. Takeaways for future conversation starters included how at one point we wrote in a zigzag formation (right to left, then left to right, then right to left again) and other fascinating tidbits about language history. Go give that a listen on your favorite podcast app.
I was most intrigued by the topic of necessary silent letters. As someone raised in the U.S. of A., I occasionally fought with my South African mom and English friends over spelling conventions. I loved the simpler, American spellings that Merriam-Webster popularized to make American English more efficient and cut out the BS. In the good ole U.S. of A., it’s color not colour, center not centre, and don’t get me started on math vs. maths. Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language shaped the nation’s character itself: rough, direct, and no-nonsense.
Tangent time: whenever I order my morning iced Americano—or talk about cutting out the nonsense—I think of this hilarious video from Stefanie Yunger, the hot mamma who should honestly be the official representative of Miami Jewesses: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8e4CyGor4Z/. Yeah, no, for real.
'Good morning, good afternoon, good for you. How you know if you’re dating a good man: if he order black coffee—no sugar, no milk, no bullshit. This is gever. He simple. He gets it. He goes. If you disagree with me… you are wrong.'Back to the point: Dr. Bate raised examples where silent letters are anything but useless. The “silent e” distinguishes kite from kit and note from not. The “gh” in light and night once represented a real sound that still shapes how we pronounce the preceding vowel. Even the extra letters in knight vs. night or bee vs. be prevent confusion.
Lucky for me, the episode plugged Bate’s blog, where his recent essay “The Silence of the Letters” expands on this subject. Bate defends the much-maligned silent letters of English, showing that many aren’t silent at all. They cooperate. He walks through digraphs like ea in mean and th in their, “Magic E” pairs like kite and cute, and even the igh trigraph of night. He explains that some letters survive as visual guides distinguishing homophones, while others mark our linguistic history, linking modern English to its medieval cousins. He concedes a few impostors remain: the silent b in debt and doubt deserves eviction. English spelling looks chaotic but functions with surprising logic.
Here’s a bit of dry British humor on the topic. (Humor is in the eye of the beholder?)
I did not get permission to reshare this, but I hope they don’t mind (and of course I’ll remove it if requested). Go buy his book Why Q Needs U? (available on Amazon) and read his blog. And go click the original post: https://dannybate.com/2025/10/21/the-silence-of-the-letters/
And, of course, go check out Fogarty/Grammar Girl on Medium. As a household favorite, I was surprised I’ve only mentioned her once before on my blog. Grammar Girl is one of the few podcasts that proves you don’t need an hour-long runtime to stay relevant. 15-45 min will do.
Cover image taken from Wikimedia
The Silence of the Letters
This post was inspired by communication between me and James McConnachie, who recently and kindly reviewed my book, Why Q Needs U, for the most recent edition of The Sunday Times.
“Oh, English spelling, awful – all those silent letters” goes the cry of later-life readers, those who endured an education in English long after the infant age that so benefits its natives; when those of us in that club first learned, we had empty diaries and nothing better going on at the time. Theirs is a fair criticism. The German, faced with an obligatory B in the words debt and doubt, may rightly balk at this insult to efficiency. The Italian, watching American children cheered on at national spelling bees, may mock the foundational fact that the sounds of spoken English words don’t easily match up to exact counterparts on the page. The right-writing nations of the world don’t know whether to laugh or cry at a misuse of the ancient alphabet that apparently hushes each of its twenty-six letters in at least one word, save V.
‘Every letter?’ you may incredulously query, and fairly so. We have a sense that some are worse troublemakers than others, the better behaved members of the alphabet, like X and Z. Yet, if we rendezvous to watch the upcoming grand prix, even those two fall silent. ‘But those are French words!’ you object. ‘Yes they are,’ I riposte, ‘and now they’re English too.’
Quickly then, silent letters take us out into murky, blending waters, at the confluence of two languages. There we are confronted by questions concerning the permeable borders of a language – at what point adopted words can be said to belong to the recipient. Moreover, as a linguist, I cannot deny that the presence of silent letters in written English is a complication and source of frustration, but I also invite the scoffers to reflect on what exactly silence in spelling may mean.
Take that final word there, mean. Operate on it with your mind’s scalpel. It comprises four letters: M, E, A, N. The first, second and fourth clearly merit their inclusion. Yet the pronunciation of the word bears no acoustic resemblance to the possible sounds of the letter A, to neither the A in ate nor the A in at. Would you then label the A in mean a silent letter? I guess you wouldn’t, and neither would I. We recognise that the E and A function together, spelling a vowel sound found also in meat, meal and meagre. The technical term for such cooperative pairs is a ‘digraph’.
Standard written English relies greatly on digraphs; the letter H is especially imbued with combinatory power. We utilise H to spell the CH, SH and TH sounds (e.g. chin, shin and thin) that were absent from the mouths of the Romans, and therefore from the rendition of the alphabet that they left us. We recognise that the H in a word like their, in tandem with T, pulls its weight much more than it does in heir.
But what about what? The difference between a plain W and the H-augmented digraph in what, whale and white reflects a diminishing difference in speech, as fewer and fewer speakers pronounce whine as separate from wine. Must we wait for their dialects to die out or submit to the merger, before we designate the H in what as yet another silent letter? Even if so, the Y in mayor may remain a further point of disagreement within English, being audible for many (most?) Americans, yet mostly mute for me and my fellow Brits. Silent letters invite us to examine the fragmented state of English speech.
If collaboration with another alphabetic colleague rescues a letter from redundancy, a load more letters evade the charge of idleness. A final E is a common sight at the close of many English words, like cape, kite, code and cute. It would be remiss of us, however, to eject E from these words, lest we be left with cap, kit, cod and cut. This characteristic practice of English spelling, which I was taught as ‘Magic E’, again involves two cooperative letters that represent the single intended vowel sound – meaning that, in a strange way, you can hear the ‘silent’ letter E. This is another example of a digraph, only this time with the two ingredients split from each other in the sequence. No one said it couldn’t work that way.
Since we have extended our defence to written words in which a ‘silent’ constituent ensures a particular pronunciation, we are compelled to hear the plea of similar cases. The GH within everyday words like night seems at a glance like an egregious waste of ink. It’s a relic of a lost sound, dropped from speech during English’s gradual transition from medieval to modern. Over the North Sea, the loss hasn’t occurred in its sister languages, like Dutch (nacht) and German (Nacht). Yet the English GH didn’t go quietly. Its absence left a void that the vowel could fill, which lengthened ever so slightly to bridge the gap. It came to sound like ‘neet’. This new length then rendered the vowel prey to the Great Vowel Shift (c. 1400–1700 AD), through which we arrive at my southern-England pronunciation of night. Consequently, the GH in the word night is in fact responsible for the sound of its letter I. Without the GH, we’d now be left with nit, just as light and fight would be lit and fit. Being jointly to blame, the I and GH work as one to spell a single vowel – a trigraph!
We’re now a far cry from the ‘one sound for one letter’ rule of the alphabet’s inventors, living four millennia ago. Trigraphs are both offenses to that rule and the conclusion of it. Amidst the endless dance of shifting speech, writing can stand still and continue to spell the final result. They are especially hard to rethink when the division of labour seems equal; my one candidate for a quiet Q is the rare word lacquer, but in its trigraph CQU, is there a primary speller of the underlying consonant /k/? Is it the C or the pair QU, or does the whole trio function as one seamless whole? Such a trigraph tests our perception of which sound matches up to which letter. The QU does at least save the C from softness (subtract it and read: ‘lacer’), while ‘laquer’ without the C might be read with a different vowel, as if it started like lake. Both C and QU then contribute to the pronunciation of this French acquisition; can either then be called silent?
But with a common word like night, couldn’t we at least swap the trigraph IGH for a split digraph, with I and Magic E? Wouldn’t that tidy up English spelling a bit? Yes we could, and yes it would. A word of warning, though: we might throw the odd baby out with the bath water, as this would finalise the merger of sight with site, and right with rite. These homophones are for the moment still separate in spelling, which brings us to another use for mute letters; those silent in speech may yet scream at the speedy reader not to mistake their word for another. If this function, as a signpost towards a writer’s right meaning, gives silent letters a free pass, then heck, even the K in knot, knight and know (not not, night and now) deserves to stay.
Spare a thought then for English spelling’s silent letters, many of them conscripted assistants that are there to make other letters shine. Some may still earn their keep in the medium of writing alone, guiding the reader’s eye to a quick recognition of meaning. That said, a few really have no place receiving the same grateful thanks due to the alphabet’s workhorses, the Es and Hs, that keep the engine running. I would have to agree with that frustrated German – the B in debt and doubt needs to go.
END.
Comment your thoughts. I think we should just drop English all together and learn modern Hebrew. Of course, that would make programmer’s lives more miserable than they already are.
