From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!uwvax!jon Newsgroups: net.nlang Title: silent letters Article-I.D.: uwvax.478 Posted: Tue Jul 13 14:18:52 1982 Received: Wed Jul 14 05:54:31 1982 Often and oft come down from Old English and are related to words in other Germanic languages, all containing the 't'. While the best plans of scholars go "aft agley", this is not one of those cases. There is no particular reason why the 'd' in Wednesday should not be pronounced (there's no reason why it should, either) since it comes from (older form of) Woden's Day. Silent letters perform many useful purposes in English. Besides the obvious snob value of pronouncing such letters, their main goal is to confuse kids in grade school and give the teacher a subject on which to waste unbounded amounts of time. This prevents the teacher from having to know anything about science or history (the few times it comes up, he can fake it) or having to do anything dangerous like teaching a foreign language while the kids are young enough to learn it. Silent letters also provide a nostalgic link with the past and many hours of amusement as modern scholars laugh at the jerks of yore. (This applies to non-silent letters as well. The s in sneeze should be an f.)