Silent letters ??
Can someone explain why is 'Psychopath' spelled with a 'p' and 'Silent' is not ? I mean, whats the whole purpose of having a letter which is supposedly 'silent' ? According to me, these words are spelled that way just so that there could be 'spelling bee' contests and people could have some fun (or not :( )!
Language / script is to make life easy for people and not tough !! See, the spelling of tough could have easily been 'tuff' (like bluff ..) but NO !! They had to make that word really tough !! Jokes apart but why is a word spelled the way it is ? And more over if the spelling is assumed to be correct, then why is it pronunced the way it is ? Who decided all these rules ? Why could it not be simpler ?
Do you know any language (other than english) which does this ? Write something and say something else ? As far as I know, Marathi and Hindi dont ! Neither does Sanskrit ... in fact, with these languages its exactly opposite ! You make an effort to say the word the way its written and to write the way its said !! Then why is it like this in english ? How is it in Gujarati, french, German, Malyalam, Tamil ??? ... if yes, then why ? Any input is greatly appreciated !
American english helps out a bit by tweaking British english - removing a few 'u's & 'o's .. like color instead of colour ... and pronunce in stead of pronounce , etc ... But still the question remains ! Why does English - 'world's common language' have these 'silent' letters ? What good are 'letters' if they dont speak ???
Language / script is to make life easy for people and not tough !! See, the spelling of tough could have easily been 'tuff' (like bluff ..) but NO !! They had to make that word really tough !! Jokes apart but why is a word spelled the way it is ? And more over if the spelling is assumed to be correct, then why is it pronunced the way it is ? Who decided all these rules ? Why could it not be simpler ?
Do you know any language (other than english) which does this ? Write something and say something else ? As far as I know, Marathi and Hindi dont ! Neither does Sanskrit ... in fact, with these languages its exactly opposite ! You make an effort to say the word the way its written and to write the way its said !! Then why is it like this in english ? How is it in Gujarati, french, German, Malyalam, Tamil ??? ... if yes, then why ? Any input is greatly appreciated !
American english helps out a bit by tweaking British english - removing a few 'u's & 'o's .. like color instead of colour ... and pronunce in stead of pronounce , etc ... But still the question remains ! Why does English - 'world's common language' have these 'silent' letters ? What good are 'letters' if they dont speak ???
Labels: Throught Provoking
posted by Aniruddha at 4:59 PM
1 Comments:
Gujrati doesn't have all these hidden tweaks, but French does. Rather French is much more complicated than Gujrati. And Japanese is complicated too, not as much as French and English, but yes more than Indian languages. I guess, Indian languages have come from a very structured Lipi, be it the Devnagri lipi,or the ancient languages of Pali, Prakrit or Adhmagdhi
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