Examples of words with silent letters that have begun to be often or sometimes pronounced include often, Wednesday, island, and knife.
In addition, words traditionally pronounced with reduced vowels or omitted consonants (e.g. cupboard, Worcester), may be subject to a spelling pronunciation.
Some silent letters were added on the basis of erroneous etymologies, as in the cases of the words island[4] and scythe.
Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933) reported that in his day, there was a conscious movement among schoolteachers and others encouraging people to abandon anomalous traditional pronunciations and to speak as is spelled.
According to major scholars of early modern English (Dobson, Wyld et al.), in the 17th century, there was already beginning an intellectual trend in England to pronounce as is spelled.
Similarly, quite a large number of corrections slowly spread from scholars to the general public in France, starting several centuries ago.
The standard then became [klyb] on the basis of the spelling, and later, in Europe, [klœb], deemed closer to the English original.
During the 13th century, the afore mentioned affricates became allophonically fricatives if singleton and intervocalic (the modern Tuscan pronunciation of pace and privilegio being [ˈpaːʃe] and [priviˈlɛːʒo]), essentially merging /t͡ʃ/ - /ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/ - /ʒ/ into positional allophones and rendering obsolete and useless the -s- spellings.
Since the spelling did not distinguish between the original pairs of post-alveolar affricates and fricatives, bacio and pregio started being unetymologically pronounced [ˈbaːt͡ʃo] and [ˈprɛːd͡ʒo] as well.
Bach is pronounced [bax], and Kuchen is [ˈkuxen], but Rorschach is [ˈrorʃaʃ], rather than [ˈrorʃax], Mach is [maʃ] or [mat͡ʃ], and Kirchner is [ˈkirʃner] or [ˈkirt͡ʃner].
Similarly, /ts/ in words like metsä (forest) is a pronunciation spelling of tz used in pre-1770s orthography, which originally represented a long /θ/ sound.
The dental fricatives had become rare by the 1700s, when the standard pronunciations started to develop into their current forms, which became official in the 1800s.
The /d/ sound, however, is not present in most dialects and is generally replaced by a /r/, /l/ or simply dropped (e.g. lähde "water spring" may be pronounced as lähre, lähle or lähe).
For instance, the character 町 is rarely used in Chinese but is often used in Japanese place names (where it is pronounced chō).