jon (07/13/82)
Often and oft come down from Old English and are related to words in other Germanic languages, all containing the 't'. While the best plans of scholars go "aft agley", this is not one of those cases. There is no particular reason why the 'd' in Wednesday should not be pronounced (there's no reason why it should, either) since it comes from (older form of) Woden's Day. Silent letters perform many useful purposes in English. Besides the obvious snob value of pronouncing such letters, their main goal is to confuse kids in grade school and give the teacher a subject on which to waste unbounded amounts of time. This prevents the teacher from having to know anything about science or history (the few times it comes up, he can fake it) or having to do anything dangerous like teaching a foreign language while the kids are young enough to learn it. Silent letters also provide a nostalgic link with the past and many hours of amusement as modern scholars laugh at the jerks of yore. (This applies to non-silent letters as well. The s in sneeze should be an f.)
jon (07/13/82)
Although some silent letters could be
( the gh in nite, the ugh in altho )
or have been
( the ue in catalog, the te in cigaret, the e in employe )
done away with, others actually are important to the structure of
the word. Although the n in government is often dropped, it
makes more sense to leave it in than to try to explain that
in joining govern and -ment you drop the n. Similarly for toward(s),
which would be difficult to break down if spelled tord.
(not that other words aren't already compressed that way,
but why make things worse)
The problem with total spelling reform,
besides the insurmountable question of whose pronunciation of
Mary, merry and marry to codify,
is that phonetic spelling obscures other properties of words.
z.B. 'title' --> 'titular'. The difference in pronunciation is obscured
by the current spelling, the similarity in structure would be obscured
by switching to the international phonetic alphabet.
A spelling reform I could support would get rid of silly inconsistencies
and replace a lot of rules with a few rules, but would not insist on a
bijection between sounds and letters. A letter might have a few different
pronunciations, depending on context and one a few regular rules.
By the way, Pablo, I finally figured out why 'ov' makes my skin crawl.
'Ov' doesn't look like an English word, since 'v' followed by 'e' is a
fairly regular rule at the ends of words,
but it does look like the overly cutesy 'luv', which made my skin crawl
before netnews was invented.