Let's Fix English: No More Silent Letters
The other day I was thinking about silent letters. Like… why do we even have them? It seems like so many aspects of English are designed to be deliberately confusing. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. But the biggest issue I have with my native tongue is silent letters.
We don’t really need them! Why is there an “L” in salmon? Why isn’t it just sammon? I’m not alone in this.
Words should be spelled how they are pronounced. Take “read” for example. How did you just pronounce that in your head? Red? Reed? Could be either and I’ll never tell which I intended. That’s kind of my point. You might be saying “oh but if we just spelled words the way they were pronounced then we might not know what word is which” and I would say back that that’s only because you’re used to it.
If I’m being honest, I think all of this nonsense in English is part of a larger caste system intended to identify and separate people from each other. Understanding how to pronounce words with silent letters is to know a secret code that demonstrates your education and likely affluence. And I think that’s why it perpetuates today.
Imagine for a moment that you go hire a lawyer to defend you from a crime you didn’t commit. Now, this lawyer is the absolute best in her field. She’s won every case she’s ever argued. There are stories in the Times about her brilliance. So you send her an email asking her to take your case and she responds like this:
Helo Sur,
I wood be onnerd to tak yur kaas. Fone me in the morning.
Would you hire her? Again, you KNOW she is the most incredible lawyer. But because she spells words as she pronounces them you think “my god is this woman a moron?” I bet you wouldn’t even write back. You might even think it was a joke. That’s prejudice! Even though she could communicate just fine and you understood what she was expressing there’s still a stigma attached to being able to spell words the way they are instead of how they are pronounced. This makes it a lot hard to learn a language because, in essence, you have to learn each word individually.
And sure, there are rules to these things that we teach kids. But imagine if we didn’t have to do that? What if people could just spell words the same way they sound. Then all you’d have to teach are the sounds each letter makes. No silent letters. No “I before E except after C or when…” blah blah. It’s not even like we have hard lines with the rules. There seem to be endless exceptions.
There would obviously be a learning curve to this, or rather, an UNLEARNING curve as people started to forget what they’d been taught. But having a language that is accessible to everyone, regardless of education, would make our society more equal, fair, and open to newcomers. I think in a generation or two people wouldn’t even miss the old ways much.
Kids are already kind of doing this. Texting has made English evolve into an almost entirely new language. Instead of words, there are abbreviations. LOL, GTFOH, BRB, etc. Lots of people spell “your” as “ur”, They use numbers like 2, as in ILY2. You might feel like this is a dumbing down of America and by definition it is. That’s kind of the point. To make language accessible regardless of what school someone went to. Will there be some confusion from time to time? OF COURSE. BUT THERE IS ALREADY! It’s not like English has it all figured out. But without having the secret decoder ring we all get in school makes it a lot harder for learners.
English needs some other changes but this is the one I wanted to talk about first. What say you? Should we get rid of silent letters? Or do we need to keep them? Let me know in the comments.