Why does English use so many silent letters?
435572
oy oy oy ...\n\nAt one time we actually pronounced all of those letters..knight was k nicht..  \n\nnow, when the french attacked the Anglos in 1088 at the Battle of Hastings...French was introduced.  It was the high language for the people...yet, documents were still being written in Latin---a phonetic language.  All of this mixing and borrowing brought about such oddities...  You can consult the Oxford English Dictionary or a Book of Cognates to further explore how words evolved and changed.  Cognates basically mean cousins....such a book will show you the relationship between such words that may have the same or similar meanings.\n\nby the way, Knife was originally knive [ka nee va]...then, as language evolved, we started merging sounds...and it became [ka nif] and todays [nif].\n\nGo check out Labov.  He currently teaches at Penn.  He is the founding father of socio-linguistics.  He recently put out some of his latest research on a website that can be linked via npr.org.  It examines the Great Northern Vowel Shift and how the New England area of the US is sounding different every day.\n\nOh, and a key point to your answer is the PRINTING PRESS.  The printing press basically ended up preserving language from the mid 1500's.  So, even though we sounded differently...spelling had become regulated, grammaticians more strict, and language more preserved.  Therefore, spelling rules of the 1500's are still in place today.\n\nIf you need anything else, just let me know.  :-)
419271
dropping some letter would mean dropping thousands of words. it would be better not to go through such hassle.and english dictionaries have to be all rewritten.
1052494
It has to do with the we humans process language in general and the printed word specifically.  You notice that all of the letters are there, and the beginning and ending letters are correct.  For longer words, they often have anchors at the syllable breaks.  We have difficulty when letters are missing or extra letters are added, changing the size of the words, and also when words are just typed in in a stand alone mode, and we lose context.
321353
Most likely stealth. Make sure all the letters are in the correct spaces. :)
10355
Because of the long and complicated influence from other languages as well as language 'evolution'. English is a germanic language. In 1066, Then french invaded england and we have a huge romance language influence from that. Then we have arabic words, indian words, it goes on and on. Plus some 'olde englishe' words were pronounce differently.  For instance I believe knight didn't have a silent 'k' originally. There have been many other vowel shifts and consonant additions/deletions that leave us with the mess we have today
703627
The English language is ignoble, but extremely efficient. If it doesn't have a word, it merely takes it from another language, where as other common languages (Spanish, French) have a Royal Academy that doesn't allow new words' adoption. It is also the language of the two most recently influential countries: first, Britain during the Imperial/colonial era, and now the US.
71157
because you can manage with english almost everywhere in the world\n\nThere are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Isn't it amazing how writers can manipulate them to educate, entertain, evoke emotion and communicate ideas?\n\nToday, writers reach a global community through written words on the Internet. I believe it is the responsibility of English writers everywhere to familiarize themselves with variations in our shared language, and to open themselves to the diverse English-speaking countries and cultures that created them.\n\nEnglish is second only to Mandarin Chinese as the world's most spoken language. There may be many variations in the meaning of a word or phrase, not just country-to-country, but sometimes even region-to-region within a country. As writers, we need to understand these differences and write clearly so that our words are understood by all people who speak and read in English.
444537
In England, the letter 'S' is pronounced like a 'Z' with far more frequency than in America.  Take the word 'eraser', for example.  But there isn't a specific rule, it depends on the word.
488601
letter-letter enumeration. English uses 26 letters and therefore there arae 26*26 different letter-letter combinations, such as the th of the or the no of genome.\n\nIf we have a piece of text with W words in it, and a total of C characters (only counting a-z without sensitivity to case), then there are C-W letter-letter neighbour pairs in the text. For example, \n\nmy dog is lazy (text)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 1)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 2)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 3)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 4)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 5)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 6)\nmy dog is lazy (pair 7)
219903
that is only 15 letters
1162160
We speak like that in Australia, too.\n\nThe first two examples are both simple cases of liaison, where otherwise silent word-endings attach themselves to the front of a vowel at the start of the next word. Because the terminal r wouldn't be silent with most American accents, this phenomenon isn't really known there, hence all the confused Americans.
246274
It use to be raised up letters but blind people soon found it's hard to do but had to do it anyway since it's the only way. I think it was hard because how letters were complicated like how the a's might get confused with the o's and stuff like that. Then a guy with a last name Braile invented the dots which was less complicated.
249114
Question marks are not letters, and do not make up words.  So "in English" is misleading.  In Yahooese, if you will, it seems to indicate a questioning attitude.  \n\nIn computerese more generally, it means you are trying to do a search and lack some of the letters.  So, for example, "stea???" would bring up the word "stealth," as well as any other word that had seven letters beginning with "stea."
278815
The word comes from the greek word pneuma, air or spirit, and in that word the p is pronounced. In English, we tend to avoid having two consonants in a row without a vowel in between, and thus the p has become silent, but because of its origins, the spelling has been set with a p. The same thing happened with psychology, which comes from the Greek word psyche, in which the p was also pronounced.
1142916
check to see if your computer has speech recognition...my computer has that. the recognition software is so poor and none of the words match up to what you say. I realized that my computer had voice recognition after I had the exact thing happen to me and noticed that the extra writing stopped when all was silent.
1097354
my question is, why can't you type out the whole word half the time?
536529
It would be impossible to avoid repeating the vowels.  The most consonant sounds per vowel allowed in English is demonstrated in the word "strengths", which has 3 sounds before the vowel and 3 after.  That is, the maximum consonant-to-vowel sound ratio in English is 6 to 1.  Since the alphabet is considered to have 20 letters that represent consonant sounds and 6 that are considered to represent vowel sounds, a ratio of 3.33 to 1, this is theoretically possible, but MOST syllables in English don't have a 6 to 1 ratio, so you would probably want to use the same vowels again.  In fact, I believe the letter "e" is the most commonly used letter in English.\n\n(In this answer I am glossing over some MAJOR issues about how the spelling system represents sounds in English, but I think it'll give you the idea.)