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:
“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“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)