Silent Letters
Further information: Silent letterSome letters do not provide any information about contemporary English pronunciation. For example, in Old and Middle English was an allophone of /f/ occurring between vowels. The deletion of historical final schwas (weak vowels) at the end of words such as give and have phonemicized /v/, but the now-silent ⟨e⟩ remained at the end of most /v/-final words. Words spelled with final ⟨v⟩ such as rev and Slav remain comparatively rare.
Read more about this topic: English Orthography
Famous quotes containing the words silent and/or letters:
“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In one instance, we understood that a woman was the post- mistress, and they said that she made the best one on the road; but we suspected that the letters must be subjected to a very close scrutiny there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)