Innovative Linguistics idea: there are no silent letters

We’ve talked about the concept of silent letters in English for so long, but have we really considered the possibility that there are none?

An idea worth exploring is that, in the long term, we might assign the pronunciation of a word to the word itself, rather than to each of its individual letters.

But wait, you might ask, how do we determine the pronunciation of novel words like “wug”?

Well, I think that from the pronunciation of various complete words stored in our minds, we can generalize and form rules about what each letter typically sounds like. These rules serve as convenient tools for learning new vocabulary. However, when these representative rules—formed in our brains—are violated, such as with the supposedly “silent” in words like though, we are surprised.

Another possible phenomenon is that we assign specific pronunciations to combinations of letters. An example could be , which is often realized as /t/ in words like Ptolemy or pterodactyl.

One way to test this hypothesis could be to create novel words like pterospondee and observe whether the hypothesis holds true.

Although one might argue that it’s contradictory to rely on individual letters to learn the pronunciation of new words, I think there’s a fundamental difference between how we store the pronunciation of certain words in our minds (as a whole, leading to the idea of no silent letters) and how we apply general rules to individual letters.