The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules (48 page)

Somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, the humble schwa became immensely popular, and people who ought to have known better began to sprinkle it everywhere. Lazy lexicographers and careless editors stuck in a schwa wherever they thought it would fit. Needless to say, spelling, diction, and correct pronunciation suffered and have continued to suffer.

Because it has been so greatly overused, everybody should look upon the schwa with deep suspicion. There are countless examples in dictionaries and text books where the author has used a schwa when anybody who cared to pronounce the word correctly would see that it was not necessary. This infatuation with the schwa is merely a form of phonic laziness.

It cannot be denied that the schwa has its place. The endings
tion
and
sion
are usually schwas, as are most of the
le
endings and many of the
er
endings, but there are enough legitimate schwa sounds without phonic laziness producing more. Since poor pronunciation leads inevitably to poor spelling, both the teacher and the student should sound a word out carefully before deciding whether or not it contains a schwa.

C
HAPTER 55

Silent Consonants:
h, g, k, p, w, b, l, n, t, c, d, s, m, r, ch

M
ost languages have one or two letters that may occasionally be silent, depending on the spelling or the punctuation. Thanks to its history of borrowing, however, English clearly has more than its fair share of letters that are sometimes not pronounced. In fact, almost all of the letters of the alphabet are, at one time or another, silent letters.

There are two main reasons why we have so many silent letters. First, the letter is part of the original word which has changed over time with, perhaps, the addition of affixes or compounding. The resulting words have left us with letters that we no longer pronounce. Second, imported words that have not yet been fully assimilated and anglicized sometimes contain silent letters. There are many examples of borrowed words that have been in our dictionaries for generations and probably never will be anglicized.

Because vowels are often silent, especially when they are part of a diphthong, we shall look only at the silent consonants. For the silent
e
, see
Chapter 6
.

The most common of the silent letters is the
h,
which can appear at the beginning of a word, in the middle, or at the end. It appears in an extraordinary variety of words and is usually followed by a vowel.

Almost as common is the silent
g,
which appears most frequently as the initial letter of a word but can also be found in the middle of a word. The silent
g
is almost always followed by an
m
or an
n:

The silent
k
usually appears at the beginning of a word and is almost always followed by
n:

The silent
p
is quite versatile. It can appear at the end, in the middle, or at the beginning of a word. The majority (but not all) of these words are of Greek origin:

The silent
w
most often appears at the beginning of a word and is usually followed by
r
, though there are exceptions:

The silent
b
is usually found at the end or near the end of a word. In most cases. it follows the letter
m:

The silent
l
usually appears in the middle of a word and is followed by a consonant. It is most often preceded by the letter
a:

The silent
n
is almost always found at the end of a word and usually follows the letter
m:

If we exclude all the words that use
tch,
we can see that the silent
t
is usually preceded by the letter
s:

The silent
c
usually follows the letter
s,
but there are some exceptions: