"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 01/02/18 (silent letters: knight, knot, knife, knitting, answer)

I have some silent letters for you, cos for the last few days I've been talking about how tricky English is, such an irregular language. Silent letters are some of the things that puzzle people so much, because we have no idea why they are there. Some of languages are entirely phonetic, or certanly more phonrtic than other. Lots of words in Ehglish are phonetic, they sounds as they are written, but there are so many others that aren't. The reason fo this, again, is that English has absorbed so many words from different cultures. Quite often we have absorbed letters which we then don't pronounce because it's too difficelt to get round our native tongue. So if you take the word know, to have knoledge with its silent K. That's just one example. You've got knight and knee and knives and knit and knock. You have a silent G in gnat and gnome. B in subtle, numb. L in salmon, N in solemn. A W in answer, and so it goes on and on and on. So I thought I'd take some of these examples and explain why they're there in the first place. English is predominantly Germanic language, so around the 5th century, the Jutes came over the Jutland, that's part of northen Germany and Denmark now. They settled in Kent. The Saxons came over from Saxony in Germany. They settled south of the Thames. The Angles came over from what is now Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, and they settled in northen and central England. So you had all these Germanic tribes coming in and the result is an awful lot of silent letters that we took from German, but they weren't always silent. To take knight, the German word for a boy or a knave was knecht. For a while, when that was twisted around our tongue and became knight, we pronounced it as k'night as well. Likewise, we took a k'nife. We ate with a k'nife before we had "nives". We went on to our k'nees to pray. The Anglo-Saxon talked about k'nitting, which turned out to be knitting in the end. K'not in ropes or strings, that gave us knitting and knots. So that explains that. The W in answer, likewise, is Germanic. The easy way of remembering that is that it's very much linked to swear with the W in that as well, which we do pronounce. So ot cimes from answarian, which we took from German. To answer originally was to respond to an accusation in court. So if you remember that legal sense of swearing and answering to rebut an accusation, you remember that W. But over the next two days, I'll take some more silent letters and explain why they are there and possibly why we don't pronounce them any more as well.