English is Crazy #4 [Silence of the B in ‘Lambs’]

DUMB!!!!!

Also: Bomb, numb, lamb… and… doubt??

What’s up with the silent B????

And, like, we also add silent letters to the beginning of words, like the letter K?? Knife, knight, knot???

Why do we do this to ourselves??? Are we playing an elaborate prank on people learning English as a second language?? Or maybe the words weren’t long enough, so we’re like, let’s just tack on some random letters?? Are we bored??

So what‘s going on’?? Because the truth is many of them didn’t start off silent!! And why is it that the more English we learn, the less it makes any sense???

I’ll tell you!!! Let’s goooo:

THIS IS SO DUMB

[5,000ish BCE] So, once upon a time, there was PIE. But it didn’t taste like anything because it was a language. I know, disappointing. But PIE, also known as Proto Indo European, is believed to be the ancestor of language families like Latin, Germanic, Slavic, Indic, Iranian, and others.

And PIE most likely had the root *dheu-, which meant “dust, vapor, smoke.” And on top of that root, the word “dheubh” was built, which meant “confusion, stupefaction, dizziness.”

[500 BCE] And then this “dheubh” word probably slid into Proto-Germanic as “dumbaz,” which, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, meant, well, exactly what you think it means; “dumb, dull.” So, not much has changed in 2,500 years. Same ole, same ole. But now the next time someone dares to call you a dumb*ss, you can respond with, “Yes, I am an heirloom of an ancient time. A relic. An antique. I’ve walked the earth for thousands of years. Bow to me, lowly pheasant.”

You’re welcome.

Proto-Germanic ended up splitting into three different language branches: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic (Oh hey, that’s English!)

Old English ~

[450 CE] “Dumbaz” became “dumb,” and it was used to describe a person who was mute, silent, refraining from speaking, or unable to speak. Like in the phrase, “blind, deaf, and dumb.”

Middle English ~

[1100s] Anyway, the B is thought to have become silent around 1200 or 1300. Why? Because it’s English. It does what it wants. What did you expect? I told you, this is so dumb. And eventually the word came to mean both “mute” and someone who’s “foolish” or “ignorant.”

This is also more or less the same path that “lamb” took. It started out as “lambaz” in Proto-Germanic, and we think the B fell silent around the 1200s.

BOMB

So this one went around the world before coming into English ✈

It started out from the ancient Greek word, “bombos,” which sounds both like the French word for candy, “bonbon,” and the Israeli peanut butter snack, “Bamba,” but I assure you, it did not mean either of those things. Instead, it meant “a deep and hollow sound,” or “echoic.”

Then it moved into Latin as “bombus,” which still sounds delicious to me, but unfortunately had more or less the same meaning as its Greek origin. When it came into Italian as “bomba,” it began to sound even more like the peanut butter snack — is anyone else starving? — but actually came to mean “a hollow ball or shell filled with explosive material.”

Early Modern English [1500s] ~ Modern English [1600s+]

[1500s] Then the French took it and made it “bombe,” and eventually, in the 1580s, it moved into English as “bomb.”

But in Italian, French, and Spanish, the B is still pronounced today. It’s just English that went rogue. ’Cause we’re like that.

DOUBT, NUMB

I’m so sorry to tell you this, but the silent B was added to “doubt” on PURPOSE just to f*ck with you.

You see, the Middle English word for “doubt’ was “douten,” and was taken from the Old French “doter,” of more or less the same definition. (It’s become “doute” in today’s French.)

But then sometime between the 1300s-1500s, some people were like, oh, we should make this word more Latin-y, where French had originally taken it from. Because in Latin, it was “dubitare.” And Latin had probably gotten it from the PIE root *dwo, which meant “two,” which also eventually gave us other English words like “dubious” and “double.”

And actually the whole adding a silent B thing for funsies didn’t stop with “doubt.” We also did it to “numb.” Like, “numb” was actually “nome” in Middle English. That B is new!

This is because of something called the English-Language Spelling Reform. It had been going on for a long time, with a lot of action in the 1500s and 1600s. And basically it was a bunch of different people and publications proposing how they thought English words should be spelled, since there was no real standardization of spelling during this time.

And some of these reformers really wanted to make spelling more logical, like British lexicographer John Hart, who, in his works on the topic, is known to have written:

“…the vices and faults in our writing, which cause it to be tedious, and long in learning; and learned hard, and evil to read.”

Evil to read, indeed. If I ever join a heavy metal band with a bunch of librarians who hoard stacks of banned books under their desk, that’s what I’ll call it.

But other reformers were authors/scholars of Greek and Latin literature, who probably walked around all hoity-toity with ancient monocles and top hats. And these fancy people weren’t looking to make English spelling more logical, no — they wanted to connect English words to their etymological origins. So they tacked on silent letters to a lot of words like “numb,” that used to have those letters pronounced in their original Latin or Greek.

But the thing is they also made a lot of mistakes and often had no idea what they were talking about. They added a silent S to “island” because they thought the word came from a different word in Latin and then French, but it actually came from Proto-Germanic, and there was no S in the original word.

Personally, I think that during a time when it was considered super lucky to be able to go to school and learn how to read and write, adding extra silent letters is just crazy talk. Like, you’re just making everything harder on purpose??

(Here are some other proposed changes over time that didn’t make the cut.)

But anyway.

KNIFE, KNIGHT, KNOT

[1700s] Old and Middle English had this construction, “cn,” where both letters were pronounced. So, originally, “knife” was “cnif,” while “knight” was “cniht,” and “knot” was “cnotta,” and so on.

But over time, the C sound got weaker and weaker, and eventually, by 1750, people stopped pronouncing it altogether, even though we still write it (albeit as a K.)

Alright friends, I’m going to eat something before I gnaw off my fingers, then throw my laptop out the window and set this whole office on fire. What should I have? Gnocchi?