Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER

       We often hear about “silent e,” that magical letter that turns a can into a cane or a glob into a globe, as Tom Lehrer put it in his charming song for the Electric Company many years ago, but a greater problem for English spelling is a large set of silent consonants.  It is one of the reasons English words are so hard to spell or, if you have their spelling before you, so hard to guess their pronunciation. 

I think it is only in anglophone countries that you can find spelling bees or spelldowns in every school, and statewide and national contests (televised!) every year.  They would be pointless in most alphabetic languages, as the spelling usually tracks the way people speak, but English spelling is stubbornly conservative: except for a few words here and there, every attempt at spelling reform has failed miserably.  And among the spellings that are conserved in English, like fossils in rocks or amber, are those permeated by consonants that were once perfectly loud but are now mute.

       Take wright, for example, now old-fashioned by itself but a part of cartwright, wheelwright, and playwright: of its six letters, three are silent.  That’s not quite accurate, for if we dropped the –gh– we would have writ, with its “short” i, but still, that stretching of i into a diphthong or double vowel sound is a rather petty function for a gh to perform.  Sometimes gh seems entirely superfluous, though it may lengthen the vowel sound a little, as in through or though or bough, three words that ought to rhyme but don’t.  I just used ought, which rhymes with taught, but in both word the gh seems pointless.  But then sometimes the gh is a quite unsilent f-sound, as in tough, cough, and laugh.  And look what happens when you put an s before laughter: it slaughters the f-sound.  What malignant gremlin twisted our tongues in such random and irritating ways?  

       Well, it seems that hundreds of years ago the gh was pronounced like the ch in German Bach or Scottish loch.  That gurgly sound in the throat was unstable in England, though it stayed put in our cousin German: through corresponds to German durch, though to doch, laugh to lachen.  In different dialects of English the gh went in different directions, sometimes to a kind of y-sound or glide (and then into a diphthong) as in wright or right, sometimes to lengthening the vowel as in through or though, and sometimes to an f-sound.  In fact in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and some other shires some people still say thof for though today.  These facts may not help a foreigner learn to pronounce the gh-words, but at least they connect the words historically.  Noam Chomsky, the most influential linguist of our time, has argued that conventional English spelling is “a near optimal system” for representing English words, in part because it preserves historical connections of this sort.  Still, one shudders to think what a not-so-near optimal system would be like.

       Not only wright but many other good English words begin wr-: wrack, wrap, wrath, wreak, wreck, wren, wrench, wrestle, wretch, wring, wrist, write, writhe, wrong, wrought, wry, and more.  These all come from the Germanic heritage, like the gh-words.  Today the w- is silent, but if the spellings reflect ancient sounds then the w- used to be sounded.  But how do you combine a w-sound with an r-sound?  I can’t do it unless I slip in a little vowel between them.  And it turns out that a few of these words once had variants with such a vowel: Old English wrenna, the bird, had a variant werna, for example, while wrought comes from the original past tense of work.  But I think the problem lies mainly with the r, not the w.  In different modern English dialects the r is sounded in strikingly different ways, and in Old English it was almost certainly “rolled” or “flapped,” with the tongue gently striking the alveolus, the hard palate above the teeth, much as it is in Spanish and Italian.  The lips had nothing to do with it.  Today in the standard American dialect our lips curl on an initial r- while our tongue rises and curls back but does not touch anything.  To make a w- we round our lips, and to combine that with a curl seems impossible.  But if you flap the r you can still round your lips at the same time.  Try it!  And maybe the initial w– was once a little closer to a v-.  In Old High German the word for “wren” was wrendo, probably pronounced as if vrendo, and a Low German cognate of wrestle is frösseln.  I hope that helps.

       Another strange feature of English is the disappearance of k– and g– when you put them before an n, as in knack, knave, knead, knee, knight, knit, knock, knot, know, and knuckle; and gnarl, gnash, gnat, and gnaw.  These also come from the Germanic heritage and, yes, these letters too were once pronounced.  The German counterpart of knave is knabe (with k– sounded), which means “boy,” though it is a little out-of-date.  But these double sounds, unlike wr-, are not hard to say, and in some cases they sound more apt than their diminished modern forms.  I think we should bring them back.  But some people would ganash their teeth if we did, and rap our kunuckles.

       Then there is the way English messes up Greek.  It has taken thousands of words from Greek, and you would think it would pronounce them correctly out of gratitude, but no.  In mnemonic the m is ignored, and in pneumonia, psalm, pseudo, and psyche the p is ignored.  In rhythm and rhododendron the h is neglected, and the same is true in Christ (which used to be spelled Crist), as well as chronic and chrysalis.  But in theater and thesis, and in philosophy and photo, the Greek h does something odd to the initial consonants, making them fricatives instead of stops.  There are explanations for all this but, well, they would take up another column.

       If the non-anglophone world had voted on which language should be the World Language it would probably have rejected English, if only for its maddening spelling habits, such as its ghostly consonants that have no sound.  But that is not how such things are decided.  We should be grateful if we grew up speaking English, and learning to spell it, while our brains were still absorptive and didn’t ask many questions.

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.