Frustrating as it is, English is not a phonetic language. Not only do letters have many different sounds, sometimes they have no sound at all! Perhaps, the most notorious case is the silent E at the end of words.
Here are just a few examples:
able, have, love, make, more, name, take, time
Let’s take a look at the noun note.
E remains silent even in the plural form: notes
Or even when it forms part of a compound noun: notebook
Now, let’s take a look at the verb care.
E remains silent in the third-person-singular form: cares
Or in the past simple or past participle form: cared
Or when adding a suffix: careful, careless
Silent E has a purpose though. It usually gives the vowel on the other side of the consonant a strong sound, the way we say the letter in the alphabet.
cake (A), Crete (E), hire (I), cone (O), mule (U), type (I)
To illustrate my point, if you take the E away from the following words, not only do you have a new word, the vowel sound changes:
fate >> fat, here >> her, fine >> fin, robe >> rob, cute >> cut
Besides silent vowels, especially the notorious E, there are even times when consonants have no sound:
B: climb, dumb
C: muscle, science
D: Wednesday
G: gnome, sign
GH: caught, though, thought
H: character, ghost, hour, why
K: kneel, knife, know
L: calm, half, walk
M: mnemonic
N: autumn, damn,
P: pneumonia, psychology
S: aisle, island
T: listen, often
TH: asthma
W: answer, write, wrong
Other examples of silent consonants are those that are doubled. Just one would be sufficient: stuff, egg, ball, apple, kiss, watt
Listen to the audio below.
As you can see letters can be silent and appear to have no purpose, but they’re there nonetheless. So deal with it!
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