The sounds of silence

I have always said that the dictionary contains as many thrills and adventures as any novel. On family trips during my childhood, I would sit in the back of the car next to my sister, her nose buried in the latest Nancy Drew story while I read a German vocabulary book, much to the bemusement of my parents. Words cast their spells over me in a different way, but those stories were just as strong. Sometimes my battered dictionary raised more questions than it answered. Why did a knight need a k in his name? When did b sidle up ‘thum’ and c intercept a pair of ‘sissors’? All questions to be answered when I became a proper word detective, I thought. Now, half a century later, I have come to appreciate that every silent letter is a tiny historical document, the stamp of a decision made in a single moment of time that has lingered ever since.

The first thing to say is that many of our silent letters were once anything but silent. That k in knight, for example, is a straightforwardly Germanic borrowing, and so its sound was once very hard. Had I lived a thousand years ago, someone might have come ‘k-nocking’ at my door as I sat with a ‘k-night’ upon my ‘k-nee’ whilst ‘k-nitting’. It’s a lovely idea (the sound I mean, obviously), it clearly proved too sticky for the English tongue, and our ancestors steadily honed the k away until it became nothing but a letter. A useful one, it’s true, since it distinguished the shining armour kind of knight from its homophone ‘night’ – which incidentally was also pronounced quite differently, with a raspy gh sound similar to the ch in the Scottish ‘loch’.

For a long while English sounded more or less as it was spelled, until two things happened that would end up divorcing sound from spelling and leaving today’s children with one of the toughest educational journeys they will ever have to make. Firstly, the printing press arrived. William Caxton set up his press in Westminster in 1476, and for the first time texts could travel easily and far beyond a local community. A level of standardisation was needed quickly to bring a semblance of order to a chaotic spelling landscape, since those living in the north needed to understand what those in the south were saying.

Secondly, just as print began to lock spellings into a single form, English pronunciation began to undergo what has become known as the Great Vowel Shift. It’s a title that sounds like a daring heist, and in some ways it was. Over the course of the next 200 years, English saw a wholesale rearrangement of its long vowels. As a small example, words such as ‘mice’, ‘time’, and ‘bite’ saw their vowel sound change from a long -ee (meece, teem, and beet) to the eye sound we know today.

Shakespeare, who famously put two different spellings of his own name on his will, was writing at a time of great flux, and it shows.