Oh, if we can talk about silent letters then there’s a lot more to be said! Unfortunately, since I speak the global lingua franca you probably know it all already. But please humour me, so I can pretend I’m from some small country where only a million of us speak our little common tongue…
In English, as I said, the k in knight is silent. But so is every consonant before n at the start of a word, apart from s: gnome, pneuomonia. There are two exceptions: gnu in British English, because people apparently copied the pronunciation from a 1957 song in which the g was pronounced; and the name of King Cnut. g’s also silent in words like reign and feign.
P before s at the start of a word is silent (psychology).
Doubled consonants are never actually doubled. What they do is indicate a short vowel.
In the inverse, e spends a lot of its time just modifying and lengthening vowels. Originally, it was pronounced as a schwa in words like make. Sometimes it’s completely silent, like in borne.
In a lot of English dialects, you don’t ever have to pronounce h. In my one (South-Eastern English), you have to pronounce them unless 1. they’re in ph, sh, ch, th and have their own sounds; 2. they’re after an r (rhino); 4. they’re in the mess that is gh; 3. they’re after a vowel, but I don’t think this happens in any real English word, but rather loanwords like noh; 5. they’re after a c in certain Latinate words like chord.
Speaking of gh, it was originally pronounced like German ch. Now, it can be /f/ (rough), a vowel modifier (fight, bought), silent (caught). Or just g in ghost.
“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!”
In my accent, we don’t pronounce r in either place in torpor, it’s just a vowel modifier. And in fact, the end of torpor is a schwa. We don’t say the g in ring either, it just modifies the consonant. You do pronounce if you’re heading into a non-schwa vowel: tango has a g but not singer.
The l in silent in salmon because in the 18th century, the people who mattered were big Latin fans (which is the same reason for the unnatural and false idea that to boldly go is incorrect, because Latin verbs contain the pronoun). It’s also silent in calm.
The h is prescriptively silent in neanderthal, which is so little known that it can’t even be called correct. It’s also silent in Thailand and Thomas. And foreign words like Lhasa and Bhutan.
w is never pronounced after a vowel (cow), except which it starts a new syllable (leeway). It’s a vowel modifier.
beaux is just /bo:/ and tsar and czar are both /za:/. but that’s not our problem. See also words like nouveau.
Public service announcement for Americans: the vowel in Thames is e; shire in a word like Cambridgeshire uses either a schwa or a little more like er; ford in Chelmsford again has a schwa. borough in Peterborough is often just br and a schwa.
You normally wouldn’t pronounce the e in every, unless you’re particularly posh perhaps.
Some dialects don’t pronounce t, replacing it with a glottal stop. I should mention that both h- and t- dropping in English are viewed negatively and associated with the lower classes.
The a’s silent in death, tread and so on, and in other words it’s a vowel lengthener (beat, boat) but still not pronounced. An exception is at the end of words, eg. moa, boa when it’s pronounced as a schwa.
The u is silent in poultry, whereas in mould it’s a vowel lengthener. Famously, in British English it also appears in words like harbour and colour.
au isn’t always long, sometimes it’s a short o like in fault.
ue is silent in words like rogue.
Is that it?
[Woops, the l in fault is not silent. What am I talking about… it is in talk though ;)]
It’s worth noting that people were speaking like this when our spelling starting settling down… listen out for the way he pronounces sir, you can hear it’s just a rhotacised i. Note also that e being pronounced in determined right at the end.
