And lo On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:27:07 +0100, John VanSickle  
<evi### [at] hotmailcom> did spake thusly:

> Invisible wrote:
>> Since it _is_ Friday and all...
>>    If I take 3L of water at 30°C and cool it to 4°C, what would its new  
>> volume be?
>
> Slightly smaller.
>
>> Where the heck do silent letters come from?
>
> They represent sounds that existed in the spoken language at some point  
> in the past, but which have since been lost.  I blame the French.

or the Germans, or the Romans, or the... anybody else who's had an  
influence on the current version of English. For example "ghost" was  
originally spelt as "gost" but possinly under the influence of the Dutch  
their version "gheest" was used in a printing and it stuck.

>> As I understand it, before the invention of the printing press, words  
>> didn't have standard spellings. You just spell the word approximately  
>> how it sounds. The first printers fixed the spelling of several words.  
>> (E.g., "put" is spelt with a "U" because that's the letter that could  
>> be printed most clearly. Nothing to do with phonetics.) This utterly  
>> fails to explain why words like "knife" have a "K" in them. (

As an aside this has helped to show regional pronunciations and shifts.  
Take the simple word "Blessed" and it can be seen written as "Blessid" or  
"Blessud" and note we even have the current variant "Blest" thanks to the  
-ed/-t sound similarity.

All good fun.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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