Let's write about how we pronounce English words

English is full of letters we write but don’t pronounce. 

The inferiority complex that put silent letters in English spelling.
An echo essay by Arika Okrent*, published in the History News Network (HNN). 

Silent consonants got into English in a few ways. One group of them, the gnat-comb-wrist-should kind, was there in the beginning and simply kept hanging around, after we stopped pronouncing them. Another group, the pneumatic-psychiatric-mnemonic kind, came in with scholarly words coined or borrowed by scholarly people using spellings from scholarly classical languages. 

A similar group, words of the rendezvous–faux pas–gnocchi type, were borrowed with their fancy continental spellings and maintained to display their fancy foreign origins.

Most silent consonants belong to one of those groups, but there is another group: silent consonants that were not there when they became English, but were added later to emphasize their high class
origins. They were consciously added in response to a linguistic inferiority complex.

After the Norman invasion of 1066, replaced English with French as the language of official business, English went into decline as a written language. Most of the population continued to speak English, but the social class that had maintained it as a written language--nobility, landholders, clergy--had been replaced. Latin was the language of religion and erudition. French was the language of government and high culture.

A few centuries later, the Normans had become thoroughly English. English slowly came back into writing and, especially after the printing press started churning out books, English began to flourish as a written language. But it had been dormant for a long time, so while it was robust and healthy as a spoken language, there was no trusted authority or tradition to follow when writing it. That wasn’t such a problem at first, as there was great variety in the way people approached style and spelling, but soon people felt the need for some direction.

In the sixteenth century, English was held to be deficient to Latin and Greek, which learned people still studied in school. However, most of the growing reading public wanted books in English. Authors obliged but often prefaced their English works with defensive justifications for why they were writing in English and apologized for how, as one translation noted, “our grosse tongue is a rude and barren tong.”

There was a movement to bring the rude and barren tong up to snuff with some conscious attention. Writers not only began borrowing loads of Latin words like describe, deduce, and conclude, they also started going overboard with so-called inkhorn terms, Frankensteins they built from Latin pieces like addubitation (the act of doubting oneself) and honorificabilitudinitatibus (the state of being able to achieve honor). 

But one of the more subtle ways this urge to raise up English to a more Latin level was to add extra letters to existing words.

Receipt, salmon, and doubt came into English through French and were at first spelled in various ways that approximated how they were pronounced. Receipt (recette in modern French) might be receit, resayt, or recyte. Salmon (saumon in modern French) could be samoun, samowne, or samon. Doubt (doute in modern French) was spelled doute, dote, or even doughte in old texts.

If you were in the know— well-educated and familiar with Latin— you could see that these words traced back to the Latin words that had developed into the French words over the previous centuries. The related Latin words, receptus, salmo, and dubitare, had some extra consonants in them, but they had stopped being pronounced in French and weren’t pronounced or written in English.

But they could be! If you wanted to play up your familiarity with those classical origins, you could stick them back in. During the Renaissance, writers and translators started using more and more Latin words in order to enrich the vocabulary or just show off. They borrowed words straight from Latin like receptive and dubious. And older words that were distant relatives of those were recast in a Latin mold. Receipt gained a p, doubt gained a b, and salmon got its l.

They weren’t the only ones. Dette became debt. Endite became indict. In most cases, the Latin-inspired interloper letters remained silent, but sometimes putting them back in writing made literate people eventually start pronouncing them too. Perfect first entered English in the c-less French way, as parfit. In the late sixteenth century the Latin connection to perfectus was made explicit in the spelling, but it wasn’t until much later that people started to actually pronounce the c. Even a hundred years later it was often
pronounced as perfet. 

Something similar happened to adventure, which came in as aventure, and falcon, which was long pronounced faucon.

In a few cases, the urge to Latinize spellings made etymological connections that were never there in the first place. Iland, for example, was from an Old English word, igland, but in the late sixteenth century it gained an s to become island on the mistaken assumption that it had something to do with Latin insula.

Likewise sithe, from an Old English word for a cutting implement, became scythe on the assumption that it had some connection to the Latin scindere, for cut (which is a valid root in the word rescind). Scissors (formerly sisours) also got its c from a mistaken scindere assumption.

Latinized spelling was haphazardly applied and didn’t always stick. While receipt held on to its mute p, deceit could have just as well become deceipt, but though a few writers tried that out, it didn’t take. Other Latinized forms like sainct for saint (better to see the sanctus) and hable for able (connecting it back to habilis) also died on the vine.

So we’re left with silent letters that only sometimes give us a little peek at the distant history of words and where we got them. We did get a lot of words from Latin, but sometimes we forged the receipts.

Okrent was born in Chicago to parents of Polish and Transylvanian descent and was fascinated by languages since an early age.

*Arika Okrent holds a PhD in Linguistics and Psychology and writes on language. Her book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language will be released by Oxford University Press on July 1.

Let's Write about Miracles

Massabielle Grotto, in the Lourdes Shrine

Maine Writer comment: My husband and I have been to Lourdes and, although we have not seen this particular documentary, we agree with the assessment written by critic John Anderson.

Published in America the Jesuit Magazine:  It is tempting to use the word “miraculous” to describe “Lourdes,” Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai’s quasi-mystical portrait of the French holy site, and it wouldn’t be excessive to do so. But it does seem a bit glib regarding a film of such dignity, charity and profundity—and one in which hope is made so palpable.

Filmed during the 2017, Feast of the Assumption—a time when even more than the usual thousands descended upon the site—“Lourdes” occasionally suggests a Bruegel-esque migration of the faithful, always hopeful and often hobbled, arriving at what they expect will be their physical and even moral repair. They are a fraction of the estimated 6 million who descend yearly on the village in southern France where, between Feb. 11 and July 16 of 1858, the 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous witnessed 18 apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the Massabielle Grotto.

“Lourdes” occasionally suggests a Bruegel-esque migration of the faithful, always hopeful and often hobbled.

Thousands of otherwise inexplicable cures have been unofficially credited to the site; 70 miracles attributed to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception—who was revealed at Lourdes—have been recognized by the Vatican, and Bernadette was canonized in 1933. Lourdes is synonymous with divine intervention.

The simple vastness of some images in the film is inspiring—the hordes swarming before the camera becoming emblematic of the faith that spurs them on, against what would seem to be overwhelming obstacles, including their own disabilities. Some of the action is captured casually, even offhandedly—the hospital at Lourdes, for instance, where young nurses, male and female, cheerfully bathe, clothe and encourage their temporary patients, the “infirm pilgrims” who suffer the most extreme handicaps. 

Lourdes France the Shrine's Grotto

How the passengers on the bus-sized ambulance that transports them got to be the way they are is never explained, but one can make assumptions. These are not people whom medical science considers salvageable.

Vigil candles at the Lourdes Grotto

The simple vastness of some images in the film is inspiring—the hordes swarming before the camera becoming emblematic of the faith that spurs them on.

Here and there, we get to eavesdrop on personal histories: the roofer who fell onto a pile of rocks; the spurned lover who attempted suicide twice and lived; the priest who every year hosts a group of Parisian prostitutes, praying to mend their ways. The entirety of Lourdes is portrayed as a place of tenderness and caring, a Christian ideal that is presented without comment or judgment—not even the kind of inadvertent judgment that camera movement is capable of making.

Had “Lourdes” conformed to this kind of cinema-verité approach throughout, it would have been a different movie, not necessarily a worse one. “Lourdes” isn’t selling anything—plenty is for sale in the gift shops, which the film makes a point of scrutinizing—but as counterintuitive as it might seem, this makes it a riskier film: The faithful will see “Lourdes” as a wide-screen endorsement of their Catholic belief. Unbelievers might well view the entire endeavor at the Massabielle Grotto—where the ailing anoint themselves with the moisture they wipe from the black stone walls—as an exercise in futility. The blind do not see and the lame do not walk in “Lourdes.” There is what might be a minor miracle toward the film’s conclusion, but this is beside the point of the film, which is hope and its power to propel.

Without the narrative structure that Demaizière and Teurlai impose on their documentary, they would have made an art film, and that clearly wasn’t the intent (despite the impressionistic feel of so much of the movie). Intermittently, the film follows six supplicants as they prepare for their trip to Lourdes and shows us what they find there. They include a father of two ailing boys, one too sick to travel, the other carrying his younger brother’s teddy bear as a kind of proxy to the Blessed Mother; a transvestite prostitute tormented by his work who is granted his wish to serve as an altar boy during Mass at the basilica; Cedric, who as a boy wandered out of his house and was hit by a car, and now seems to be a child in a man’s wheelchair-bound body. (That his mother’s recollections are heartbreaking will come as no surprise.) One man, stricken with A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig’s disease, makes an eloquent testament of his faith and hope.

There is an unglamorous pageantry to “Lourdes,” whose cast of characters arrives at the grotto as spiritually eager as they might be physiologically despairing. 

All are remarkable; some are more distinctly memorable—the nursing instructor, for instance, who tells her team of caregivers, “Make them look nice for the Holy Virgin!” Or another woman, woefully observing the sheer numbers awaiting holy intercession: “So many—she can’t help everybody. It’s like the lottery...”

Or the overweight girl whose father describes her as suffering horrible sores that we never see. What she really needs, it seems, is not to be bullied at home or to be used by her father as an object of pity, but no one ever said the halt and the lame were the only people the Blessed Virgin was calling, when she came calling at Lourdes.

John Anderson is a television critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributor to The New York Times.