We observed this practice up until the 17th century, pronouncing, for example, “knee” as “knee” and “knife” as “knife”. But sometime in the 1500s we started dropping that “k” sound, probably because people just found the “kn” sound a bit clunky to pronounce. 18
Why is K silent on his knees?
Words like knowledge, knee, knife have their origins in association with Old English forms. These forms began with cn (the change from c to k was a spelling change that is not the subject of the current questions). Therefore, the words beginning with k were pronounced with the sound k followed by n.
What is K doing in the knife?
The combination means that the tongue is quite busy when you say k nife or k night and it’s easier to omit the k sound. In English, the k-sound before an n was dropped in the 1500s (although the kn-sound survives in languages like German or Dutch).
Why do words have a silent k?
The word knight, with its mute k and mute gh, is related to the German word for servant, where each letter is pronounced. … In a word like bite (not a true Old English example, but simpler for presentation) the e at the end would have meant the word bi was pronounced.
Why does the word knife start with AK?
The word knife begins with a silent /k/ and ends with a silent /e/ because these two sounds were pronounced at the time the spelling was corrected. The word was pronounced something like “kuhniffa”. And written language changes much more slowly than spoken language.