One more word

[Heather]

bomb -- Greek bombos

jamb French/Latin

[Dave Smith]

That was a bit tongue in cheek Heather, but I agree the English language would be better if it was a bit more Australian.

TTFN

[Heather]

Ok, you are all very clever but I still want to know if the "b" used to be pronounced and when it stopped being pronounced. Neville, where are you Neville?

Heather

[Heather]

Tongue. Now there's an interesting word Dave.

[Neville Briggs]

I don't know Heather You might have to spend time looking back through old poems back to Chaucer for example and try and work out how he used the metre and the rhymes, if you can find any words with silent letters.

Words like your name Knight, used to be pronounced in AngloSaxon a bit like Ker. nigckt.
And knife the same.ker-niff. knave ( a youth ) was ker-narveh, night, nigckt.

The Germans still say, recht for right, nacht, for night. knabe for a youth.
and of course AngloSaxon was a Germanic language.

My suspicion is after the battle of Hastings, 1066, when the French language had an influence in England was when silent letters began to come in. French is full of silent consonents. What agony I had at school over those.

But I think we should retain the old spelling, even though pronunciations have changed, because the spelling retains the origins and history of our language.

[David Campbell]

A Dum(b) R(h)yme

I dunno ’bout this silent “b”,
cos it seems flamin’ strange ter me
that letters (w)ritten disappear,
a si(g)n that somethin’s (w)rong, I fear,
wiv English an’ the way it’s tau(gh)t,
fer all me learnin’ comes ter nau(gh)t!

I dunno w(h)y or even w(h)en
it started orf, but then agen,
I g(u)ess sum things we need ter (k)now
are lost in days uv long ago.
This ta(l)kin’ shou(l)d be easy stuff…
instead they makes it bloody tuff!

But one thing really gets me goat
wiv all these crazy things I’ve (w)rote.
It sends me w(h)acko, round the twist,
them little squiggles w(h)at get missed
in words like (p)sychotherapee…
’ow can there be a silent “p”?

David

[warooa]

That's very good, David

Or harder still, by degrees
a ryme without silent B's
and wun that's spoken as it's sed
and dusn't tie in nots ya head
I can do it - I'll show'um!
and tackle a fonetic pow'um

I see what you mean though Heather, it's not until you actually look at how many silent letters there are in our language that you realise. But at least think of the words like "scuttle" and "rebuttal" that you could call 'subtle rhymes'