The Real Reason Some English Words Have Silent Letters
一些英语单词有无声字母，来看一下真正的原因是什么
There are legitimate explanations for why words like pterodactyl and tsunami exist.
有一些英语单词有无声字母，如pterodactyl（翼龙，[ˌtɛrəˈdæktəl]）、tsunami（海啸，[tsʊˈnɑmi]），存在着合理的解释。
Let’s look at this paragraph:
让我们来看这一句：
The rogue knight doubted that the asthmatic knave in knickers could climb the castle columns, but when their wrangle wrought chaos on the couple, the knight resigned with the knowledge that their tight-knit friendship wouldn’t succumb to dumb disputes.
流浪剑客怀疑那个穿着内裤的气喘吁吁的无赖是否能爬上城堡的柱子。但是，意识到他们的争吵已给这对夫妇造成困惑时，剑客放弃了，因为他知道他们的友谊亲密无间，不会屈服于这些愚蠢的争论。
Now if you were to pronounce every single letter you saw in that ridiculous sentence, it would sound a lot different than what you just read in your mind. And these aren’t even the hardest words to pronounce in the English language.
现在，如果你把这个荒诞的句子中每一个字母都念出来，听起来会和你刚才在脑子里读到的完全不同。在英语中，这些词还不是最难发音的词。
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. But these often distressing words weren’t intended to be so confusing.
英语因使用无声字母而声名狼藉。事实上，大约60%的英语单词包含一个无声的字母。但这些经常令人沮丧的词语并不是有意让人如此困惑。
In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced, like when “knight” sounded like “kniht” or “bite” sounded like “beetuh.” In the Middle Ages, the English language was rocked by the Great Vowel Shift, a major phonetic change that affected how long vowels were spoken. These changes took place over the course of several centuries and eventually led to modern English pronunciations with little or no changes in spelling. Of course, it makes writing these words correctly even more difficult, so use these spellings rules you should have memorized to help you get them down pat.
在许多情况下，这些无声的字母实际上是发音的，比如：“Knight”听起来像“Kniht”，或“Bite”像“Beetuh”。在中世纪，英语发展史上发生了一次“元音大推移”，这是一次重要的语言转变，尤其是长元音的发音时间。在接下来的几个世纪里逐渐发生变化，最终形成现代英语的发音，而拼写几乎没有发生任何变化。当然这些变化，使得正确书写这些单词变得更加困难。因此，你必须记住所有的拼写规则，做到倒背如流。
Some of these changes are marked by the notorious silent “e,” which makes “rid” an entirely different word than “ride.” This usage makes “e” a diacritic letter, one that is unpronounced but changes the pronunciation of another syllable.
其中一些变化以一个声名狼藉的无声字母“e”为标志，如：“rid”与“ride”是完全不同的两个词。这个用法使“e”成为一个“变音”字母，一个不发音但会改变另一个音节发音的字母。
Other words with silent letters are borrowed from other languages. For instance, “tsunami” is actually a Japanese word, and “psychology” comes from the Greek words “psyche” (meaning spirit or soul) and “logica” (meaning the study of something). However, the consonant combinations “ts” and “ps” aren’t used to start words in English, so the first letters became silent so it would meet the language’s phonological rules.
有些带有无声字母的单词是从其他语言中借用的。例如，“Tsunami”（海啸）实际上是一个日语单词，“psychology” 来自希腊语单词“psyche”（意为精神或灵魂）和“logica”（意为研究某物）的组合。由于英语中不使用辅音组合“ts”和“ps”作为单词的开头字母，第一个字母不发音，符合英语语音规则。
But there is one more factor that resulted in these silent letters: ego. Some people with influence over how the English language would evolve added extra letters simply because they could. Many printers who operated printing presses in England came from the Netherlands and Germany. Because they had control over a language that was, at the time, still not standardized, they added extra letters to have them resemble words from their home countries. In a similar way, scholars added the silent “b” to “doubt” to educate the (what they assumed was) oblivious public on the word’s derivation from the Latin “dubitare.” In reality, all they did was turn “dout” into “doubt” when no one asked for an unnecessary consonant. As a result, we have constantly misspelled words –– see which one most people get wrong in your state.
无声字母的形成还有一个因素：自我意识。一些对英语演变有影响力的人士，会在单词上添加字母，这仅仅因为他们可以这么做。在英国经营出版社的商人来自荷兰和德国，由于当时语言还不规范，他们对此就有了一些掌控的权限，增加一些字母，让单词看上去与他们本国的语言相似。以同样的方式，学者们刻意在单词“doubt”（怀疑）中加入不发音的字母“b”，以此来教育（他们所假设的）不知情的公众，该单词是从拉丁语“dubitare” 派生而来。事实上没有人要求他们这么做，而且他们所作的也只是将“dout”变成“doubt”。因此，我们经常拼写错误 — 看看在你的国家里，哪个单词经常拼错。
While silent letters may seem useless at times, it’s almost impossible to ignore them because they play such a prominent role in the English language. Luckily, we found some grammatical loopholes that can make your life easier. Check out the “strict” grammar rules that you actually don’t need to follow.
虽然无声字母看起来毫无用处，但忽略不计几乎是不可能的，因为它们在英语中扮演着非常重要的角色。幸运的是，在语法方面我们发现了一些“漏洞”，可以让你的生活轻松一点。看一下那些“严格”语法规则吧，事实上你不必严格遵守。
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[英语原文及图像来源：Claire Nowak, Reader’s Digest]
