One of the most difficult things in English is spelling and pronunciation. Because English is a mish mash of Latin, Old English, French, German, Greek… in fact every language in Europe.

英語中一個難點是拼寫與發音。因為英語是拉丁語，古英語，法語，德語，希臘語的混合體。。。實際上是包含歐洲所有語言。

There are a lot of odd spellings for words which originated from other languages.

有很多源自其它語言的奇怪拼寫。

As the pronunciation of these has become more ‘anglicized’ the pronunciation of the letter has been dropped but the spelling kept. For example, think about:

當這些詞的發音已變的更加「英語化」時，這些詞裡字母的發音已經被改變了，但其拼寫卻一直在。比如：

answer – dumb – gnash – gnome – knife – plumber – wrong

In fact in any word beginning with gn, kn or wr, the first letter is almost certainly silent!

其實在任何以gn, kn或wr開頭的單詞中，第一個字母幾乎都是不發音的。

There are loads of words in the English language like this, many ending in a silent ‘E’ (but not the magic ‘e’ which changes the pronunciation even if you don’t pronounce it).

英語中有很多單詞是這樣的，有很多是以不發音的「E」結尾（但不是那個即使本身不發音也能改變整體發音的神奇「e」）。

Have a look at this (long) list of the most common words with redundant letters:

來看一看最常見的那些有多餘字母的（很長的）單詞單子：

above, answer, appear, are, base, beauty, before, blow, blue, book, build, colour, come, correct, country, course, develop, does, done, door, early, earth, enough, every, eye, family, field, figure, flow, follow, foot, friend, full, give, good, govern, great, group, grow, have, head, heard, hour, house, island, knew, knife, know, laugh, learn, leave, listen, live, love, low, measure, minute, more, move, often, once, people, piece, pull, ready, room, rule, said, serve, several, show, slow, snow, some, stood, sure, their, there, though, through, thumb, took, true, watch, were, what, where, who, whole, wood, world, write, you, young, your.

Which letters are redundant in the above words?

在上面的單詞中哪些字母是多餘的？

Can you think of any more? (think about days of the week and months of the year)

你能想出更多例子嗎？（想想星期幾和月份這些單詞）

最後問大家一個問題：