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<blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9013089" data-attributes="member: 7035894">It doesn't bug me; I love it! English is a big, unwieldy beast and I wouldn't haven't it any other way. Also, many if not most of the weird spellings in English result not from other languages being spelled more or less phonetically but from the evolution of English itself. Spoken English changed drastically between the late medieval and early modern periods as it lost a lot of its more Germanic pronunciations. So most of our silent letters when we spell a word were once pronounced. The classic example is knight/night, which were not originally homophones: knight was pronounced k-nic-h-t (the c-h is a Germanic sound where the two consonant sounds sort of ellide together; they are not exactly full syllables but it is hard to explain; it is distinct from the modern soft ch sound and you know it when you hear it), while night was nic-h-t (oh, and in both the i is pronounced as in &quot;bit&quot;).Edit: and knife was k-niff-eh (unless the subsequent word started with a vowel, in which case the final &quot;eh&quot; became silent).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Clint_L, post: 9013089, member: 7035894"] It doesn't bug me; I love it! English is a big, unwieldy beast and I wouldn't haven't it any other way. Also, many if not most of the weird spellings in English result not from other languages being spelled more or less phonetically but from the evolution of English itself. Spoken English changed drastically between the late medieval and early modern periods as it lost a lot of its more Germanic pronunciations. So most of our silent letters when we spell a word were once pronounced. The classic example is knight/night, which were not originally homophones: knight was pronounced k-nic-h-t (the c-h is a Germanic sound where the two consonant sounds sort of ellide together; they are not exactly full syllables but it is hard to explain; it is distinct from the modern soft ch sound and you know it when you hear it), while night was nic-h-t (oh, and in both the i is pronounced as in "bit"). Edit: and knife was k-niff-eh (unless the subsequent word started with a vowel, in which case the final "eh" became silent). [/QUOTE]

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