"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/02/18 (silent letters: debt, doubt, salmon, solemn, ghost, gnat)

Today I have more silent letters. Yesterday I was talked about the Ks that we used to have, the hard Ks in English, whuch we took from all Germanic invaders that had come to Britain around the fifth century. So we had knots and knitting and knees and knechts and knight and things. So today we're going to talk about some other silent letters. And I'll start with B, the silent B that we get in things like debt or doubt. Those goes back to 16th-century scholars, and I mentioned recently how there was a big drive around this time to make English more classical, to make it more refined, a little bit more like Latin and Greek, and not just more refined, but more predictable as well, so, easier to learn, because Latin and Greek are sort of quite smooth in terms of their endings and their plurals, etc. And probably a little bit of showing off as well, amongst all these scholars. So they decided that doubt, which had previously been spelt D-O-W-T or D-O-U-T, deserved B because the Latin for doubt is "dubitum". Same for debt, it was "debitum". So they put the B in there, but they didn't suggest we change our pronunciation, they just liked the B for the spelling, because it looked more Latinate. Likewise, salmon got L, it goes back to the Latin "salmo", and solemn got an N, it didn't have one before, the Latin was "solemnis". And so, that accounts for a lot of the silent letters that we have in English. But some of them, the words were serendipity, really, or accidental, or even hiccups. The H in ghost, for example,  we owe entirely to William Caxton, who standartised a lot of our spelling in English and was huge influential. He did very, very good things. But he learned his trade in Flanders, and in Bruges, and when he came over to England to set up his printing press, he didn't ehought typesetters, so he brought some over from Flanders, where he had been working. They were Flemish, the Flemish for ghost is "gheest", with an H, so they stuck one in because it looked more familiar to them. And we've been left with the result ever since. And finally the G in gnat - nothing to do with Latin, nothing to do with Germanic. That is an Old English word, and the G would have been pronounced when it was first used in the days of King Arthur. So, it would have been a g-nat, which I eould love to bring back. So, with all this confusion going on, I thought we should give ourselves a big pat on the back for knowing how to spell anything at all.