Pronunciation – Why Is the K Silent in ‘Know’ and ‘Knotty’?
phonologypronunciationsilent-letter
Why don't we read ''k'' here?
Know → /nəʊ/
Knotty → /ˈnɒt.i/
Knockout → /ˈnɒk.aʊt/
Best Answer
The silent ⟨K⟩ occurs before the letter ⟨N⟩ in most cases,
e.g. Knife , knot, knee, know, knowledge, knight etc. There are some exceptions which are too few to bother with.
The ⟨kn⟩ combination comes from the Germanic languages where the K is still pronounced in some words.
Before the 17th century people in England also pronounced words like knee, and knife using the /k/ sound. However, over time, and for whatever reason, the /k/ sound became silent, probably because it was too awkward to pronounce.
There are many advantages to having silent letters in English, and one is that different spellings can help us to differentiate between homophones which are words that are spelt differently, but have the same sound. e.g. night and Knight.
The silent e at the end of words also gives us a clue as to how to pronounce preceding vowels.
Finally, many English spellings are weird because of our history. Our alphabet has a limited number of letters and therefore couldn't accommodate the influx of new sounds and words brought in by invaders over the centuries.
⟨Angled brackets⟩ represent orthography (spelling) while /slashes/ represent sounds
There are several reasons, three of which stand out:
If you keep the original spelling, connections with the same word used in other languages remain intact. In honest and psychology, for example, this makes it easier for people to communicate across English, French, Latin, Greek, etc. In German, they spell Zentrum. This makes it harder for us to remember how it is spelled, and sometimes this even makes it harder to learn the word for learners. Similarly, Dutch spells akkoord, which is again less consistent with many other languages and the language of origin, French.
It is terribly hard to get people to change the way they have always spelled words. Imagine if you had to change your spelling all of a sudden after having spelled a certain word the same way for 30 years! Or, what may be even worse, regular spelling changes occurring every 5 years, which nobody will be able to learn or keep up with, as in Dutch. And, even if you decide that something needs to change, there will be 1001 opinions as to how. Should it be onest? onnest? onnist? As it is, no spelling system in the world is wholly phonetic, not even new systems. Imagine you had to read a teks laik this, weh ai'uhv tsyowsin suhtin konvensyuhns.
How will you take into the account the fact that people in different regions pronounce the same word differently? Should all spelling be based on the phonetics of Received Pronunciation? Or should each region use its own spelling, making, say, British harder to read for Australians and vice versa?
Best Answer
The silent ⟨K⟩ occurs before the letter ⟨N⟩ in most cases,
e.g. Knife , knot, knee, know, knowledge, knight etc. There are some exceptions which are too few to bother with.
The ⟨kn⟩ combination comes from the Germanic languages where the K is still pronounced in some words.
Before the 17th century people in England also pronounced words like knee, and knife using the /k/ sound. However, over time, and for whatever reason, the /k/ sound became silent, probably because it was too awkward to pronounce.
There are many advantages to having silent letters in English, and one is that different spellings can help us to differentiate between homophones which are words that are spelt differently, but have the same sound. e.g. night and Knight.
The silent e at the end of words also gives us a clue as to how to pronounce preceding vowels.
Finally, many English spellings are weird because of our history. Our alphabet has a limited number of letters and therefore couldn't accommodate the influx of new sounds and words brought in by invaders over the centuries.
⟨Angled brackets⟩ represent orthography (spelling) while /slashes/ represent sounds