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:
“Pity the man who has a character to support—it is worse than a large family—he is silent poor indeed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)