Viewing Thread:
"Why is there silent letters in the English alphabet."

I get really anoyed with silent letters such as the b in crumb there is no point.

Pokemon hater wrote:
> psycho should be spelt sycho.

In theory, yes, but would it work in practise? I have a feeling that without silent letters, the entire alphabet would crumble and we would all be speaking like vegetables. They wouldn't change it now though, anyway, so we are reasonably safe! They may change it in the future (almost definately after we're all dead, so we won't have to live with the complications), but we're fine for the moment and I like it the way it is.

PORKER

psycho should be spelt sycho.

americans spell wierd to, eg grey is spelt gray in america.

Armatige Shanks wrote:
> MoJoJoJo wrote:
> All this stuff was decided over 200 years ago

I think
> that's why the
> Americans spell differently, other than them just being
> stupid I mean ;)

---

I know a lot of it happened during the fities...
> where the American educational system was rapidly deteriorating, so the American
> goverment changed the spellings of many popularly used words, so that they were
> spelt more as they sounded (not quite phonetically, but close), thereby raising
> the level of literacy in America overnight.

So it went from crappy to horrible? ;) Not bad for an overnight change, I suppose :D

MoJoJoJo wrote:
> All this stuff was decided over 200 years ago

I think that's why the
> Americans spell differently, other than them just being stupid I mean ;)

---

I know a lot of it happened during the fities... where the American educational system was rapidly deteriorating, so the American goverment changed the spellings of many popularly used words, so that they were spelt more as they sounded (not quite phonetically, but close), thereby raising the level of literacy in America overnight.

Meh@the alphabet! ;)

the alphabet is dodgy in the first place anyway so there! silent letters i think are useful as they help pronounce words like crumb as you said. i can't imagine myself saying crum but that's probably because we've been saying crumb our entire life ain't it?

We "read" something and when we've finished, we've "read" it.

Read ("reed") and read ("red") - different pronunciation, same spelling.... daft if you ask me.

So what about photograph it has two ph's when there should be two f's so it should be fotograf.

I think crum sounds worse than crumb..... probably because I'm used to it with a b, but anyway, this is a pretty pointless topic.