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The Sound of Silence: What's Up With Silent Lettters? · Ridiculous History

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  Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man,
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  Speaker 1: the myth, the legend, our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: The X is silent. The second X, that is.
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  Speaker 3: Do you guys know this about the other Max Williams?
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  Speaker 2: I don't know about the other Max Williams at all.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: You're Max Prime, as far as I'm concerned.
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  Speaker 3: For sure.
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  Speaker 4: So there is a Max Williams who played in the NFL. Okay.
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  Speaker 3: He has two X's instead of one X.
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  Speaker 4: We have the same birthday.
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  Speaker 1: What team does he play for?
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  Speaker 4: He's out of the league now, I believe.
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  Speaker 1: I think you mentioned this guy.
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  Speaker 5: Well, Max, you may well know that when I refer
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  Speaker 5: to you often in our work-related missives, I often refer
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  Speaker 5: to you as Maximus with double X's.
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  Speaker 2: So to me, the second X is... is silent.
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  Speaker 1: That's more Max for your buck. Linguistically speaking, that's Mr.
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  Speaker 1: Noel Brown, the one and only. They called me Ben
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  Speaker 1: Bullen for several reasons. Guys, we are all language nerds
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  Speaker 1: here on Ridiculous History, so much so, in fact, that
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  Speaker 1: peek behind the curtain, bit of a breaking of the
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: fourth wall, your pals Noel, Ben, and Lauren Vogelbaum have
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  Speaker 1: spent years scheming on making an etymology show.
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  Speaker 2: That's the study of insects, right? That's very close.
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  Speaker 1: It's entomology.
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  Speaker 2: Damn it! You knew that.
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  Speaker 1: I did.
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  Speaker 2: I'm being coy. Ben, I got a question for you.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: With the way I pronounce my name, Noel, isn't the
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  Speaker 2: E technically silent?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, kind of. It's an elided E.
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  Speaker 2: If they call me Noel.
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  Speaker 5: which people often do, and I don't really bother correcting them,
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  Speaker 5: then that would be a, what's the opposite of a
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  Speaker 5: silent E?
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  Speaker 2: A heard E, a perceived E?
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  Speaker 1: It's crazy, man. It's one of those. What are those
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  Speaker 1: old jokes? So a mnemonic I do to remember people's
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  Speaker 1: names is when I shake their hand while I'm holding
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  Speaker 1: their hand, I ask them to spell the name for me.
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  Speaker 1: You've seen me do this.
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  Speaker 5: I've seen you look deeply into their eyes, and yeah.
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  Speaker 5: Is it Sarah with or without an H?
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  Speaker 2: It's an intense exchange.
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  Speaker 4: It's even weirder when he asks people to spell Ben
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  Speaker 4: to him.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, spell it back to me.
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  Speaker 1: That's the joke, you guys, because they asked me to
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  Speaker 1: spell my name, and that's fine. That's quid pro quo.
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  Speaker 1: And sometimes I'll say certain letters are silent. And that's
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  Speaker 1: what inspired our research associate Ames for today's episode, Noel.
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  Speaker 1: We often joke in this language, and sometimes we say
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  Speaker 1: it seriously, we often say that English is very difficult
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  Speaker 1: to learn because we have all sorts of tricky things
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  Speaker 1: like we have a sentence that is one word with
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  Speaker 1: different meanings. Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo, buffalo. That's
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  Speaker 1: a real sentence. This language is ridiculous.
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  Speaker 2: It is, Ben, and I will say this. I've seen recently,
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  Speaker 2: I want to say Japanese.
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  Speaker 5: It happens in a lot of languages where there will
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  Speaker 5: be a word that sounds the same but is spelled
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  Speaker 5: slightly differently, and you can basically say a whole sentence
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  Speaker 5: with the same word.
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  Speaker 2: Like multiple times. And that becomes the joke of the TikTok. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And it gets funny too and tricky in tonal languages.
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  Speaker 1: Like in Mandarin, I remember, there's a poem called something
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  Speaker 1: like the stone lion. And it's the same sound, just
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  Speaker 1: with different intonations. And it's kind of a long poem.
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  Speaker 1: But also, you know, we have run into this repeatedly, Noel,
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  Speaker 1: throughout our young lives. Questions like, Why are, to your point,
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  Speaker 1: read and read spelled the same? There's no way to
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  Speaker 1: tell other than context clues. Why are our grammar rules
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  Speaker 1: as messy as a drunk jazz band?
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  Speaker 2: Ooh, I love a drunk jazz band.
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  Speaker 5: Maybe they're also smoking some jazz cigarettes while they're at it. Ben,
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  Speaker 5: it also reminds me of the quandary of learning German.
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  Speaker 5: as a non-native speaker, where the gender of words changes
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  Speaker 5: and oftentimes has nothing to do with the perceived gender
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  Speaker 5: of the word itself. It's something that you ultimately have
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  Speaker 5: to memorize along with the word.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And that happens in Latin languages as well as Germanic languages.
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  Speaker 1: Another plot twist, another little Shyamalan for all our English speakers.
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  Speaker 2: Shyamalan Madigna.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And folks like me and you, Noel,
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  Speaker 1: who are still learning English, another plot twist is the
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  Speaker 1: idea of the infamous silent letter. I mean, why would you,
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  Speaker 1: no offense to our French compadres, but why would you
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  Speaker 1: have a bunch of letters in a word if they
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  Speaker 1: are not pronounced?
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  Speaker 5: It's a good question and one that I hope that
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  Speaker 5: we get to the bottom of in this episode. I
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  Speaker 5: got to say, Ben, when I first read the topic,
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  Speaker 5: when AIM submitted this brief, I thought there was some
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  Speaker 5: phenomenon of like wordless correspondence, silent letters, like using invisible
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  Speaker 5: ink or something.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know. Secret code? That's not the case.
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  Speaker 5: So the silent letter is one of the many mysterious
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  Speaker 5: parts of language, not just the English language.
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  Speaker 2: We are going to mainly stick to the English language.
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  Speaker 5: Today that seems specifically designed to, you know, confuse people,
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  Speaker 5: perplex people, and potentially make us lose our childhood spelling bees.
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  Speaker 2: Ben, were you a childhood spelling bee competitor?
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  Speaker 1: I was.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. How'd you do?
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  Speaker 1: I did all right. I did all right, but then I—
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  Speaker 1: At the risk of sounding too cool for school, the
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  Speaker 1: issue was.
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  Speaker 2: Ben, you're in the spelling bee. You had no risk
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  Speaker 2: of being too cool for school. Thank you. Thank you, guys.
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  Speaker 1: The issue was, you know, it's all about rote memorization.
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  Speaker 1: A lot of it is, for sure. And then clever
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  Speaker 1: figuring out of context clues. But you're not.
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  Speaker 1: It's not the same as learning literature.
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  Speaker 2: I'm going to need you to use that word in
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  Speaker 2: a sentence because that's clearly going to help. Well, you
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  Speaker 2: know what? I'm joking.
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  Speaker 5: But based on what we're talking about today, that could
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  Speaker 5: absolutely inform because context can make a huge difference in
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  Speaker 5: deciding whether or not a word has a silent letter
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  Speaker 5: or not.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and the etymology, too, if you know something has
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  Speaker 1: Germanic roots or if you know it comes from Latin—
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  Speaker 1: then that'll help you kind of suss out how the
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  Speaker 1: pieces of the word fit together. And Noel, we had
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  Speaker 1: Max pop on real quick.
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  Speaker 2: He did pop and then he popped right on out.
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  Speaker 1: There's something burning in your head about a spelling bee.
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  Speaker 2: Pop on back, man.
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  Speaker 3: Oh, no, this is going to give you my take
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  Speaker 3: on that. I think I competed in like one spelling
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  Speaker 3: bee and I knew how to spell the word. But
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  Speaker 3: my stage fright that I had in elementary school was
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  Speaker 3: so much that I accidentally misspelled the word.
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  Speaker 4: It was a very easy. And then I decided to
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  Speaker 4: do theater.
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  Speaker 2: There you go. Which has nothing to do with stage fright. Somehow.
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  Speaker 2: I'm confused about this juxtaposition. I think I made it
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  Speaker 2: to like.
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  Speaker 5: The version of the spelling bee where I got to
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  Speaker 5: compete on stage in my local elementary school, but I
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  Speaker 5: did not advance any further. But I did advance to
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  Speaker 5: the semifinals of a Blockbuster Video-hosted NBA Jam tournament.
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  Speaker 1: Hey, he's on fire. And English is on fire as well.
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  Speaker 1: Just to rip the Band-Aid off here, folks. A lot
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  Speaker 1: of different cultures will tell you that their language is
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  Speaker 1: the most difficult to learn. It's a little bit self-centered
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  Speaker 1: when you hear that, but it turns out that a
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  Speaker 1: lot of languages outside of things like Esperanto and Toki
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  Speaker 1: Pona are actually pretty difficult to acquire fluency in. And
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  Speaker 1: a lot of languages, to your point, Noel, they do
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  Speaker 1: include silent letters. This is one of my favorite facts
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  Speaker 1: that Ames found. roughly 60% of English words include some
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  Speaker 1: silent letter.
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  Speaker 2: Dang, that's a lot. That's most of them. I had
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  Speaker 2: no idea.
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  Speaker 5: Cambridge, the dictionary wing of Cambridge, describes or defines a
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  Speaker 5: silent letter as a letter in a word that is
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  Speaker 5: written but not pronounced, such as B in doubt.
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  Speaker 1: Or a lot of the letters in enough.
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  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm, true.
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  Speaker 5: The what of it all does seem a little simple
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  Speaker 5: when you just look at that relatively straightforward definition, but
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  Speaker 5: it is the sometimes why, which is a literacy joke,
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  Speaker 5: that makes things a little more complex and, dare we say,
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  Speaker 5: convoluted and, dare we further say, ridiculous. So why don't
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  Speaker 5: we travel back to the Middle Ages and something called
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  Speaker 5: the Great Vowel Shift, right?
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  Speaker 1: Yes, and on the way, we're also going to have
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  Speaker 1: to talk about how English is kind of a pirate language.
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  Speaker 2: Boy, is it ever. A lot of borrowing.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, it acquires a lot of stuff from other parts
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  Speaker 1: of the world and other tongues. So Britannica says, in
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  Speaker 1: historical linguistics, great vowel shift is a series of significant
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  Speaker 1: and parallel changes in the articulation of long vowels in
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  Speaker 1: English words. in particular, so vowels whose articulations are stressed
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  Speaker 1: and relatively longer than those of most other vowels. This
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  Speaker 1: shift occurs from the 15th to the 18th century. It's
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  Speaker 1: the big demarcation line between what we call middle English
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  Speaker 1: and early modern English.
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  Speaker 2: Right, middle English being like, whoop-de-whoop-de-whoop-de-pooh, you know what I mean?
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  Speaker 5: Right, and modern English being a little more blunt and aggressive.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's like, imagine reading the Canterbury Tales uh,
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  Speaker 1: through Brooklyn dialect.
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  Speaker 2: Which I would watch. It's a fun thing to do. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Now the, the spelling, it really does kind of put,
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  Speaker 2: do your head in a little bit. Some of the spellings.
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  Speaker 1: It brings us, it brings us to, I think our
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  Speaker 1: mutual favorite word for this episode.
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  Speaker 2: It's so silly. Of course it's, it's a diphthong. Yeah. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: And not even, let's take it a step further. Yeah. Diphthongization.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: Uh, This is the process that occurred during the great
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  Speaker 1: vowel shift. I love how English has so many specific words.
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  Speaker 1: German's a little better at it, but English has so
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  Speaker 1: many words that you will just never use. Diphthongization, as
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  Speaker 1: you were saying, Noel, is a gliding monosyllabic speech sound
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  Speaker 1: like the vowel combination at the end of toy or the,
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  Speaker 1: I would say, the O-E inside your name. It starts
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  Speaker 1: at or near the articulatory position for one vowel. And
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  Speaker 1: soon as you know it, it moves toward the position
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  Speaker 1: of the other vowel.
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  Speaker 2: It's that dip thong for thong, thong, thong. Not to
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  Speaker 2: be confused with Cisco's famed work on the thong song.
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  Speaker 1: His episode of Cribs was so weird.
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  Speaker 5: He's an interesting cat. Did he have his head spray
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  Speaker 5: painted silver in that episode?
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  Speaker 1: I think he was, I think he had a, don't
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  Speaker 1: quote me on this, but I think he had a
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  Speaker 1: yellowish or blonde wife at that time. Uh, Yeah, he
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  Speaker 1: just had he had a very strange moment on Cribs
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  Speaker 1: when he was talking about his bidet.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, well, you know what?
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  Speaker 5: He was ahead of the curve when it comes to
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  Speaker 5: bidets because, well, I don't know. We're still a little
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  Speaker 5: behind the curve when it comes to bidets. But I
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  Speaker 5: think you and I are both both fans from way back,
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  Speaker 5: but not as far back as Cisco. And I'm sure
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  Speaker 5: he had some very specific reasons that he enjoyed.
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  Speaker 2: He goes into detail. I bet he does.
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  Speaker 1: He uses a lot of diphthongs and a lot of
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  Speaker 1: close vowels. Noel, what is a close vowel?
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  Speaker 5: Well, we were talking about referring to a language as
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  Speaker 5: a tongue, of course. And that is because you got
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  Speaker 5: to use that thing to make sounds with your mouth.
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  Speaker 2: And it became a little bit, I don't know if
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  Speaker 2: this is like, it almost makes me, not evolutionarily, but
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  Speaker 2: like what caused this? It's very interesting.
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  Speaker 5: The defining characteristic with closed vowel is this idea of
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  Speaker 5: the tongue being positioned as close as possible to the
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  Speaker 5: roof of the mouth, as close rather as it can
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  Speaker 5: be without creating a constriction. Constriction would produce a sound
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  Speaker 5: that would be classified as a consonant or a hard
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  Speaker 5: K type sound. An example of diphthongization in action is
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  Speaker 5: the word meet, which was originally pronounced Meat.
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  Speaker 2: Meat.
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  Speaker 1: Free thee thou meat.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly. Then evolves.
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  Speaker 5: So I guess it's not really a physical evolution, but
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  Speaker 5: it's just more of an evolution of the way sounds
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  Speaker 5: are created to the current pronunciation meat. Our tongues gradually
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  Speaker 5: over time began to move higher in the mouth, which
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  Speaker 5: changed the way that certain vowels were pronounced.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And folks, you can play along at home. So creep
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  Speaker 1: everybody out. who is not hearing this because you're listening
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  Speaker 1: on headphones, play along as we say this. Some vowels
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  Speaker 1: are pronounced with your tongue high, like the vowel in C.
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  Speaker 1: Do you feel where your tongue is?
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  Speaker 2: Say it, C. There it is.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah, it is kind of involuntarily, like right there on
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  Speaker 5: the tip of the roof of the mouth.
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  Speaker 1: We don't think about it, right? And others, other vowels
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  Speaker 1: are pronounced lower, like the vowel in O. Father. So C,
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  Speaker 1: our tongue is high. Father, our tongue is lower. And that's,
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  Speaker 1: I'm influencing it a little bit with my tone. Max,
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  Speaker 1: what you got?
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  Speaker 4: Oh, I'm just over here doing it, but on my
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  Speaker 4: mic silent.
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  Speaker 2: Practicing.
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  Speaker 1: So, all right.
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  Speaker 2: Father.
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  Speaker 1: See, you feel it?
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's weird.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, during the, and we've just gotten into your heads, folks,
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  Speaker 1: during the great vowel shift. Those long vowels gradually moved
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  Speaker 1: upward in this positional scale. When a vowel reached the
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  Speaker 1: top and could not move any higher, that's when it
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  Speaker 1: changed into a diphthong. That's the sound that glides between
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  Speaker 1: two vowels, like piano or knoll.
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  Speaker 5: And this comes from a nice blog entry, The Great
• 15:09
  Speaker 5: Vowel Shift When English Vowels Quietly Moved by Matthew Weinberg.
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  Speaker 2: Some good writing on this blog. ProfessorMatthew, M-A-T-T-W dot com. Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And that's a great shout out because it leads us
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  Speaker 1: to another mystery. Even the experts like Professor Weinberg are
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  Speaker 1: not sure why the great vowel shift happened. There's a
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  Speaker 1: ton of debate on the exact timeline, which is why
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  Speaker 1: our window from the 15th to the 18th century is
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  Speaker 1: so wide. But the fact remains that English pronunciation did change.
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  Speaker 1: And in that change, we also see the arrival of
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  Speaker 1: many silent letters.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
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  Speaker 5: Think of the word bite, for example, pre great vowel shift.
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  Speaker 5: It was pronounced again, like a beat, a beat. We
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  Speaker 5: always do that little voice when we do.
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  Speaker 1: I don't know why we act like everybody.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: That part of history, we act like every one of
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  Speaker 1: them had, had a wheezy reedy voice.
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  Speaker 5: And likely suffered from hemophilia and very pale, very pale
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  Speaker 5: people back.
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  Speaker 2: In those days. They were pale punch. At least in
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: our recreation of it. But yeah, beat.
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  Speaker 5: So that effectively touched every single letter in the word
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  Speaker 5: as opposed to that sort of gliding that we're talking about.
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  Speaker 5: Post great vowel shift, we pronounce the word like bite.
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  Speaker 5: So we sort of combine some sounds.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And the E persists. despite the fact that you don't
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  Speaker 1: really need it.
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  Speaker 5: Sometimes these E's or these silent letters are just kind
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  Speaker 5: of historical hangers-on.
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  Speaker 1: They're artifacts that legacy hires, right? Because the spoken language,
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  Speaker 1: all languages are living technology. The spoken language was evolving
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  Speaker 1: due to all sorts of factors, but the written word
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  Speaker 1: was much slower on the uptake.
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  Speaker 5: And we do often talk about how legislation often lags
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  Speaker 5: behind technology. Not that this is a direct one-to-one, but
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  Speaker 5: we do need to remember that language is.
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  Speaker 2: A form of technology and it often has to kind
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  Speaker 2: of catch up with the times.
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  Speaker 1: That's a great point, Noel. And it's also, so we
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  Speaker 1: have the great vowel shift. That definitely gave you some
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  Speaker 1: of the silent words that ruined your spelling bee, but
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  Speaker 1: that's not the only culprit involved. We have to go
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  Speaker 1: back to the point we teased earlier So many words
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  Speaker 1: in modern English have been borrowed from other languages, from
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  Speaker 1: people who were in the area in the times before
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  Speaker 1: or contemporaneously. French, Latin, Greek kept the original spelling. They
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: have no corresponding letter in English for the way they
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  Speaker 1: were pronounced in their native tongue. Like the Greek letter Rho, R-H-O.
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  Speaker 1: It's R or R-H in Latin. It gets merged as
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  Speaker 1: a simple R in English, and it leads to crazy
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  Speaker 1: spellings like arrhythmic.
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  Speaker 5: For sure, which is one I always have to check
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  Speaker 5: myself on. Rhythm and arrhythmic, I always mess it up.
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  Speaker 5: There's a letter in there that I always leave out. Psi,
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  Speaker 5: for example, from Greek, has been kind of truncated into
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  Speaker 5: just the letter P. And S, such as in the
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  Speaker 5: word psychology. So one sound now becomes two.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and throw a Y in there, because why not?
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  Speaker 2: Why not?
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: And then, of course, you've got classic hits like Tsunami,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: which starts with a T because it's a Japanese word,
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: and in Japanese language, you have a different set of sounds, right,
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: and a different set of vowels. Psychology, of course, comes
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: from Greek. The consonant combinations in Tsunami and in Psychology
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: are They're not used to start basic words in English.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: And as a result, the first letters become silent so
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: that tsunami and psychology can blend in with the rest
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: of the nomenclature crowd.
• 19:15
  Speaker 5: Shout out to the real reason some English words have
• 19:18
  Speaker 5: silent letters by Claire Nowak.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: Maybe it's Novak. I'm just going to say it's a W.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Maybe the K is silent. I don't think it is.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: From Reader's Digest, a trusted friend in a complicated world,
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: which is a great.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Tagline. There was also this moment in history where English
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: had a huge chip on its shoulders because English was
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: thought to be, for very long time, a vulgar common tongue.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: It was not the fancy, the fancy language of the
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: learned reading and speaking Latin and Greek. So people who
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: wanted to be on the up and up in society
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: would study Latin and Greek in school. They'd study the classics,
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: but the issue was not everybody was able to afford
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: to go to a fancy school and And as literacy
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: became more popular, people wanted to read books in the
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: language they spoke and understood. So they wanted more stuff
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: in English.
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: The common tongue, right? The common tongue.
• 20:21
  Speaker 5: Yeah, because it makes sense because, I mean, Latin and
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: Greek could maybe be considered more pure languages, you know,
• 20:28
  Speaker 5: whereas to your point, Ben, English is sort of like
• 20:30
  Speaker 5: a hodgepodge melting pot.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: So there is a certain amount of, I don't know,
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Not quite xenophobia wrapped up in this distinction, but something
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: along those lines.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and shout out to Erika Okrent over at the
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: History News Network who points out that authors who are
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: trying to make a living and always trying to get
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: their stuff read, they said, okay, I will write in
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: English because I can sell more stuff that way, but
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: I am going to write a disclaimer, essentially, at the
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: top of my book to explain why I am writing
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: in English, and I will apologize, as one translation put it,
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: for our gross tongue is a rude and barren tongue.
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: You know what a term I really enjoy for languages
• 21:20
  Speaker 5: like ours? I think it's often used specifically to refer
• 21:23
  Speaker 5: to English, but a bastard tongue.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Yes, yeah.
• 21:26
  Speaker 5: Which refers to, it's an informal kind of colloquialism to
• 21:30
  Speaker 5: describe a language that contains mixed, you know, borrowed or
• 21:36
  Speaker 5: heavily influenced words and syntax from other languages rather than
• 21:41
  Speaker 5: evolving in isolation. But as we know, Ben, not much
• 21:44
  Speaker 5: evolves in isolation, you know, over time.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Not even the folks at North Sentinel Island. And if
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: you're listening, thanks for tuning in. Explain to us how
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: you got a podcast. So also writers being a somewhat
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: high-nosed insecure bunch.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: Their noses and their brows are both high tie.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, high brow, high nose. I love it. They wanted
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: to make their work look legitimate, look, in other words, fancy.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: So they would borrow words from Latin. They would do
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: that thing that James Joyce does later where they would
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: smash Latin words together, higgledy-piggledy. These would become what we
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: call inkhorn terms. This is one of the roots of
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: the weirdly specific words we were mentioning earlier. They are
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: derived from Latin or Greek. They're kind of freestyled or
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: jazzed upon, and they are used much more. Jazzed upon?
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: They're used much more in writing than in speech. That's
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: from encyclopedia.com, and sometimes these authors would even add extra
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: letters to words they stole from French. to make it
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: seem more impressive, basically. That's why we mentioned doubt, the
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: word doubt, or the word debt. Why is there a
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: B there?
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Why? Why?
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Why? The authors who popularized those words in specific or
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: those spellings put the B in there because they wanted
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: people to know they knew the Latin etymology. They knew
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: that debt comes from debitum and doubt comes from dubitare.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: And so they were like, I'm going to put a
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: B in there. So everybody knows that even if I'm
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: writing in English, your boy's aware of Latin. It's just,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: it's a weird cell phone, I think. But it also
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: didn't seem to be important to these authors and these
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: early writers to whether or not the Latin origins were true.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: For example, there's this historical evidence of people attempting to
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: force this crossover without much backing to support their ideas
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: or their new spin on words. Like the word island, I-S-L-A-N-D,
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: it comes from an old English word, igland. Just replace
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: the S with a G, but it gained an S
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: because there was this incorrect notion that if you added
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: the S, it would hearken back to the Latin word insula,
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: and then everybody reading would be like, holy smokes, this
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: guy writes in English, but he definitely knows Latin. He
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: probably didn't, because there's no relationship between those words.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 24:47
  Speaker 5: And some of these silent letters actually stuck around, like
• 24:49
  Speaker 5: the P in receipt, for example, while others eventually were,
• 24:54
  Speaker 5: you know, dropped, as is the case with the word deceit.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 24:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: Deceit. Receipts? Deceit. Yeah. D-E-C-E-I-T. I imagine it used to
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: have a E-I-P-T.
• 25:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Which is funny because then there's the deception, of course.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly. It does add a P in.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: What a messy bowl of spaghetti. Really beautiful language of ours.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: So this comes into this comes into sharp relief with
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: the invention of the printing press, because before we had
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: mass printed media, people just kind of freestyled on how
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: word was spelled. And most people were not writing stuff down.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: They were talking to each other. They were hearing each other.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: So The emphasis was on oral communication. Get your point
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: across that. The oral tradition.
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: So there's no single correct spelling. That's why if you
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: are a student in high school or in your English
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: courses in undergrad and you're looking at very old instances
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: of English canon, you're going to see a lot of
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: crazy spelling, like physic. I think we both love physic
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: from early medical text where they were just throwing Ks
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: left and right. You can see a word in multiple
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: forms because writing was done by hand, usually in monasteries,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: and they were doing their best to reflect on the
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: page the way people spoke around them. So if somebody
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: had an accent in Northumbria and the monk there was
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: writing down what they said, It would be possibly very
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: different from the monastery over in Wessex, who would be
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: spelling it the way they heard it.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Well, it's fascinating, man, because sometimes it goes in the
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: opposite direction.
• 26:48
  Speaker 5: Whereas, you know, with physic, for example, we have turned
• 26:52
  Speaker 5: it into physics, adding an S. Whereas over here in
• 26:55
  Speaker 5: the U.S., we say math, but in the U.K., they
• 26:57
  Speaker 5: say maths.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They mean the same thing.
• 27:01
  Speaker 5: They're both, you know, a study of, you know, numbers,
• 27:04
  Speaker 5: whereas physic referred to– oftentimes it would refer to medicine
• 27:08
  Speaker 5: as well, if I'm not mistaken.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 27:10
  Speaker 5: Like in the olden times. But it kind of evolved
• 27:13
  Speaker 5: to refer to a more high study of mathematics and
• 27:17
  Speaker 5: its place in the universe and, you know, various other
• 27:20
  Speaker 5: elements that, you know, the movement of the planets and
• 27:23
  Speaker 5: things like that. It evolved, of course, but sometimes you'll
• 27:26
  Speaker 5: have these historical remnants kind of stick around or get transposed.
• 27:31
  Speaker 5: There's a really great piece that Ames linked us to
• 27:35
  Speaker 5: on wordstrivia.com, Why English Spelling Got Frozen in Time, The
• 27:39
  Speaker 5: History Behind Silent Letters. And they put it really well,
• 27:42
  Speaker 5: I think, saying that silent letters are not random mistakes.
• 27:45
  Speaker 5: They are historical leftovers. They show where English has been,
• 27:49
  Speaker 5: who influenced it, and how spelling became frozen while speech
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: kept moving.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: There we go, summing it up really well. And here
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: at this point in history, we enter a slow motion
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: crowdsourcing phenomenon because you've got people spelling words three, four
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: different ways, cats and dogs sleeping together, pandemonium on the page.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: So we have to decide how to codify and uniformize
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: some of this stuff. Some spellings just end up being
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: more popular than others. They make more sense to the
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: most people. and they become the default as a result.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: And then also a lot of writers back in the
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: day are their own biggest audience. So they're writing for
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: other writers, and they all love a fancy pants word.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: So those are the spellings that often end up in
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: print and therefore become the law of the lands. But Noel,
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: I think at this point, you and Max and I
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: are Just going to accept silent letters. I remember reading
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: some madcap experiments over the centuries from people who wanted
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: to improve the language by cutting out the letters. Remember
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: when Ben Franklin got his britches up and said he
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: was going to fix the alphabet? by removing certain letters.
• 29:12
  Speaker 5: That didn't really take. Some of his stuff did, but
• 29:16
  Speaker 5: not all ideas are bangers. I want to get back
• 29:18
  Speaker 5: to physics for a second because it's a really good
• 29:20
  Speaker 5: example of how some silent letters can really differentiate between
• 29:24
  Speaker 5: two similar sounding words and what they actually refer to.
• 29:28
  Speaker 5: They can also help identify which syllables should be emphasized
• 29:31
  Speaker 5: in a particular word, not to mention their different definitions. Physics,
• 29:37
  Speaker 5: of course, P-H-Y-S-I-C-S versus physiques.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: Physics being the study.
• 29:43
  Speaker 5: Of, you know, what I was mentioning earlier, mathematics and
• 29:46
  Speaker 5: the heavens and all of that stuff, celestial bodies.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: I know I'm way simplifying the concept of physics. It's
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: close enough. It's perfect. Physiques, of course, refers to you know,
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: your physical body and it's kind of makeup or level
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: of physical fitness, sort of like if you have a
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: good physique or, you know, a shabby physique.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. When we usually use physics physique, excuse me, in
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: modern English, it has a positive connotation. You don't see
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: too many people saying, and he.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: Had a horrid physique, but that'd be cool.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: I'm going to write that down. We should use that later.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: We also know that silent letters help us as speakers
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: and readers to navigate the vast labyrinthine chasm of homophones,
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: words that sound alike but have wildly different meanings. So
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: right versus right. That's confusing if you hear it on
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: a purely audio or oral format, but if you read
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: it and you see that one of those pronunciations has
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: W-R-I-T-E and the other has R-I-G-H-T, then that helps you immensely.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Ben, remind me what a homonym is versus a homophone.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: So a homophone is like right or right, two very
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: different words that can be spelled differently but sound the same.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: A homonym is a word that has the same spelling
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: or the same pronunciation or both as another word but
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: as a completely different meaning. So read and read means
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: Could be homonyms.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: Oh, exactly. Close and close. Thank you for.
• 31:25
  Speaker 5: Reminding me of my elementary school education.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: It's all coming back to me now. But I would
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: argue that homonyms are extra confusing for people who do
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: not speak the language natively. At least homophones, like if
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: you're reading it, it's pretty clear that these are different words. Yeah.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: I'll always remember one of my old professors who lives
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: in Japan now, he's a native Japanese speaker. He had
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: this hilarious moment where we were kind of in our cups,
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: to be honest, and he was breaking down how he
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: thought English was, beat me here, Max, bullshit. And his
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: first piece of evidence was that he thought bullshit was
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: a weird word. Thank you, Max. And then he said,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: you know, think about the word close. I'm close to
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: the store to close the deal before the store closes.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: And he was like, how do you people walk around
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: talking that way?
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a great example.
• 32:17
  Speaker 5: But like I said, Ben, that happens in other languages, too.
• 32:20
  Speaker 5: So I think he might have been barking up the
• 32:23
  Speaker 5: wrong acorn a little bit there.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: Barking up the wrong acorn.
• 32:26
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I didn't make that up. That's a Matt Berry-ism,
• 32:29
  Speaker 5: who is, I would argue, a master of the English language.
• 32:33
  Speaker 5: But silent letters also have the ability to evoke etymological connections.
• 32:39
  Speaker 5: Like vineyard connects back to the vine. Sorry, vineyard is
• 32:44
  Speaker 5: how it would be pronounced, but it's spelled V-I-N-E-Y-A-R-D. You
• 32:49
  Speaker 5: would think you would maybe pronounce it vineyard, but it's vineyard.
• 32:52
  Speaker 5: As opposed to spelling it V-I-N-Y-A-R-D because it connects it
• 32:58
  Speaker 5: back to the vine.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a nice little reminder. And, folks, we are
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: such fans of odd things. of odd nooks and crannies
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: of linguistics, and we wish we could keep continuing. So
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: we may have more episodes like this in the future,
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: but we want to end on obviously a positive note.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: We are not picking on English. It's just the one
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: we happen to be currently learning. Tons of other languages,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: like you said, don't have silent letters, you know, Hebrew
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: has a very interesting relationship with vowels. Spanish, Italian, Arabic, French,
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: they all have silent letters, as do Indic languages. Finnish
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: is kind of an outlier because it's mainly phonetic, and
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: you pronounce each letter according to, quote, its value.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: Those practical Finns.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: Dude, I remember I was talking with a Finnish friend,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: and I was trying to impress her by learning some
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Finnish phrases. And she looked at me dead in the
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: face and just said, don't bother. Stop, man. Don't bother.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: Learn. Just speak English. Speak English, bro. Yeah. Leave it
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: at that. This is a good one. Yeah. Huge thanks
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: to Ames for this one.
• 34:15
  Speaker 5: And we're so stoked to have a handful of amazing
• 34:18
  Speaker 5: new research associates helping us out.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: On Ridiculous History. So, yeah, I do think we might
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: ask for some more of these linguistically based episodes.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. And big, big thanks as well to our super producer, Mr.
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: Max Williams. Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a. The Quister.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: I know I drag him pretty often. And Jonathan, I
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: know you only tune in to hear your name mentioned
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: in the credits, but credit where it is due. Jonathan
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: is no slouch in the language nerddom himself. He's a
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: pretty good orator.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: No, if anything, that's like one of his evil superpowers.
• 34:55
  Speaker 4: Yes, yes.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Big thanks to A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, a.k.a. The Puzzler, The
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Rude Dudes at Ridiculous Crime, and who else, who else?
• 35:02
  Speaker 5: Oh, well, of course, Christopher Asiotis and Yves Jeffcoats here
• 35:04
  Speaker 5: in spirit, Alex Williams, who composed this theme, and super
• 35:08
  Speaker 5: producer Max the Silent X Williams.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: And big thanks to you, Noel.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: And to you as well, sir.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: I'm getting Noel.
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: I know, it's cool. That would aggravate me if I
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: were you. No, it's fine. I'll answer to whatever you
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: call me. We'll see you next time, folks. For more
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 35:34
  Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.