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.

英语中一个难点是拼写与发音。因为英语是拉丁语，古英语，法语，德语，希腊语的混合体。。。实际上是包含欧洲所有语言。

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

有很多源自其它语言的奇怪拼写。

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:

当这些词的发音已变的更加「英语化」时，这些词里字母的发音已经被改变了，但其拼写却一直在。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!

其实在任何以gn, kn或wr开头的单词中，第一个字母几乎都是不发音的。

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).

英语中有很多单词是这样的，有很多是以不发音的「E」结尾（但不是那个即使本身不发音也能改变整体发音的神奇「e」）。

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

来看一看最常见的那些有多余字母的（很长的）单词单子：

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?

在上面的单词中哪些字母是多余的？

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

你能想出更多例子吗？（想想星期几和月份这些单词）

最后问大家一个问题：

为什么英语单词sense后面要加上一个不发音的e呢？

答案：现代英语中，绝大多数名词的复数是加s或es构成。也就是说，一个母语是英语的孩子看到名词以s结尾往往会把它看成是复数。而sens是一个法语单词，引进英语时就特意在后面加上一个e，避免一个以s结尾的单词被识认为复数。

对，sense如果不加e，就是法语sens，这也是欧洲语系混杂渗透的体现。

【英语】sense[sens]n.官能, 感觉, 判断力, 见识, ...感, 意义, 理性（sens+e）

【法语】sens[sɑ~s]动词变位提示：sens是sentir的变位形式n.m. 感觉，感官

这样的例子还有很多，比如horse, house, nose等等。

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