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In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
The silent e rule became available to represent long vowels in writing that arose from other sources; Old English brŷd, representing *bruʒd-i-, became Modern English bride. The rules of current English spelling were first set forth by Richard Mulcaster in his 1582 publication Elementarie.
However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters.
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
Cut Spelling uses three main reduction rules to convert traditional spellings into "cut spellings": [2] [3] Letters irrelevant to pronunciation. This rule deletes most silent letters, except when these letters (such as "magic e") help indicate pronunciation. Omitting or including the wrong silent letters are common errors.
Another argument is the sheer amount of resources that are wasted using the current spelling. For example, the Cut Spelling system of spelling reform uses up to 15% fewer letters than current spelling. [21] Books written with cut spelling could be printed on fewer pages, conserving resources such as paper and ink.
In English orthography, the letter k normally reflects the pronunciation of [] and the letter g normally is pronounced /ɡ/ or "hard" g , as in goose, gargoyle and game; /d͡ʒ/ or "soft" g , generally before i or e , as in giant, ginger and geology; or /ʒ/ in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre.
The doubling rule dictates that when a stressed vowel is followed by a single consonant and another vowel (which isn't 'magic e'), the stressed vowel is 'lengthened'. This can be negated by doubling the consonant between the two vowels, thus keeping the vowel short. Therefore letters are dropped or doubled from traditional spelling.