My friend is telling me that silent letters are ruining the planet. He says that the
“h” in “John”, or the “u” in “you” are printed on paper so many times that we could save many trees a year if we stoped doing this. Is there any truth to this?
Only if you’re still printing everything on ticker tape.
If there’s a silent letter in the word ‘you’ it isn’t the ‘u’.
If we made words shorter, we’d need less paper to print them on? Of course it’s true, but who cares, really? We’ve got bigger fish to fry, and for a long time, the saving made in reducing print costs would be overwhelmed by the productivity impact of all the stuff made necessary by the transition to the new version of written English.
Furthermore, because of the wide variety of English language accents and dialects, I don’t think we’d have an easy time agreeing on which are the superfluous letters in which words.
The irony being that now that most communication is done over the internet or texting on cell phones, words are becoming ever more mutated, truncated or turned into acronyms because it takes way too much time to type on a tiny keypad or touchpad.
I’ll bet we use far less paper than we were 30 years ago.
Assuming we got agreement on the idea in principle at all (and there is no chance of that because people are very conservative about spelling) I think there are quite a number of silent letters are clearly superfluous since they are not pronounced (in any accent) and don’t alter the word if removed. The ‘l’ in could, would etc. The ‘k’ in knife.
We could also print everything very small and use magnifying glasses… I don’t think changing language is where I’d start to reduce paper usage.
I wonder if your friend got the idea from George Bernard Shaw, perhaps by way of Lynne Truss who, in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves mentions
I, for one, am fascinated with etymologies. Most of the time, a “silent” letter reveals something about a word’s origins, and thus its connection to other words (including in other languages, for those of us that speak another, at least partly), that can clarify, deepen, and further specify its meaning. Surely, this helps us to communicate – when we write, but even when we speak (because we choose words to say with the spelled version in mind on some level).
(You could make a counter-argument that this implies that illiterate people do not enjoy this benefit…and, actually, maybe that’s true, for some words with “silent” letters. But not for all. You see, some “silent letters” appear in one version of a word, but are pronounced in another version (i.e., not in a closely related word – its equivalent in a different part of speech, or a different verb form), and even illiterate people are aware of the “base” version of the word.)
“Coud” and “woud” look like different pronunciations to me.
Good point! English happens to have many more vowel sounds (many plain sounds, plus many dipthongs as well) than single letters, so it has had to jerry-rig all kinds of ways to express these different sounds. That’s one reason I put “silent letter” in quotes – because, maybe half the time, the “silent” letter is serving some sort of pronunciation purpose.
You say “ta-MAY-toe” and I say “ta-MAH-toe.” Let’s call the whole thing off.
I share your fascination and I share your outlook.
I think you’d lose that bet. See The Myth of the Paperless Office. Paper usage has actually begun to decrease since that book was published, but it’s still probably higher than it was 30 years ago.
My guess is that we use more paper than 30 years ago.
I agree with you in principle - I’m sure there probably are some that are universally superfluous, just dropping them might not work in some cases (changing ‘could’ to ‘coud’ would make me want to pronounce it differently).
In other cases, dropping it might trip a vastly different pronunciation, but may subtly change the sound of the word (the K in knife makes the N a bit harder, I think. The P in psychology makes the S sharper and shorter, the G in gnome makes the N longer and more nasal)
But as I say, I agree, there probably are some that can go and nobody will care, but to have any worthwhile impact, it would need a widespread revision of standard spelling.
Write a proposal detailing your reasoning and mail three copies to me, four to your state and federal Representatives, two to each Senator, and two to the head of the English Department of every State University.
Double spaced, 12 pt font . . . in comic sans.
I doubt the net affect is to aid communication.
Non-phonetic spellings make words more difficult to spell and more difficult to read, particularly for EFL.
The occasions where a non-phonetic spelling clues one in to a connection with a foreign word (and where the phonetic spelling would not) hardly outweighs the hassle they cause.
Using a smaller font size would save paper. Smaller margins would save paper. Less leading between lines would save paper. Judicious editing would save paper. Prohibiting Dan Brown from publishing would save paper.
There are probably a million ways to save paper. We know this is true because during WWII paper was rationed and every publisher redid every procedure to conform with their paper allotments. Every possible sensible trick was used to stretch the paper at hand and still stay in business. And none of them eliminated silent letters.
So, copperwindow, you can tell your friend that the statement is true, but is also stupid and meaningless.
Where would GQ be without threads based on “things my friend told me”? :smack:
A better solution would be to use the energy that the proposed de-letter-ification project might have required and instead move towards NOT USING PAPER when it can possibly be avoided.