Mike
Carruthers:
Why
some words are spelled the way they are sometimes seems to make
no sense. Like why is there an H in the word ghost. Well there
didn't used to be.
Vivian
Cook:
Because when the first Bible was printed in England they
didn't have any English printers so they had to get them from
Holland where words like ghost were spelled with a GH. And so
the good old English word g-o-s-t became the modern g-h-o-s-t.
Vivian
Cook, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Newcastle
in England and author of the book,
Accomodating Brocolli In The Cemetary Or Why Can't Anybody Spell.
And
some of the things like silent letters like debt and doubt and
subtle, the B's in those. Mostly, those were introduced by people
who thought English should look more like Latin. And so they
added something that made it look like a Latin word.
Another example
of a word made to look like Latin is admiral.
Which was originally
amiral and a D was added. And they hadn't realized that it was
in fact a word from Persian or Arabic - amir -which is emir
today, which didn't have a D at all. So we've been landed with
a D in admiral ever since.
And there English
words today that are not pronounced the way they are spelled,but
used to be.
Things like right
and night were right and night and so forth. And so when that
sound disappeared from the spoken language the letters in the
written language became superfluous.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I’m Mike Carruthers and that’s Something You Should Know
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