English| Silent Alphabets in English Language| Curio Facts
The English language is famous for having rules that don't make sense, and the rules of spelling and pronunciation are a big reason. Some letters are pronounced, some aren't, and there's no real system for figuring out when to pronounce and when not to. In fact, more than half of the letters in our alphabet ( B, D, E, G, H, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, W, X, and Z) are silent in some words. And that's a conservative estimate. Silent letters confuse English language learners of all ages, and native speakers can't even explain why they're there. It's time that we get to the bottom of this spelling and pronunciation mystery. The English language has been written down for more than a thousand years, which means it's had plenty of time to borrow and twist around words from other languages. For example, consider Greek words like "psychology" and Japanese words like "tsunami." Because English doesn't have the Greek letter ψ (psi) or the J...
