Why do we mispronounce k in the word know?

We have "rules" that are meant to give us directions for pronouncing words that we read as well as spelling words we have heard. These are rules, not explanations or reasons. Often times these rules apply to words of foreign origin that have entered into every day use here. The rule is, a "k" when followed by an "n" is silent. The silent 'k' in words like 'knight', 'knock' and 'knob' is a remnant of Old English, and wasn't silent at all but was pronounced along with the 'n'.

The reason is not scientific but historical. Spoken and written languages develop separately. 'Knife' and 'know' both come from Middle English (about 1100 to 1500 AD). At one time the 'k' was pronounced. Over a long period of time the 'k' disappeared in pronunciation but remained in the spelling.

Knife, knock, know, gnat, gnaw are all Viking words which used to be pronounced but we leave the letters in there to see the origin and history of the word (in Sweden they still say the silent letter in knife kneefe)

The reason that they have disappeared from spelling is most likely due to the fact that the sounds were gone by the time that spelling of those words previously having those sounds was standardized in Modern English. Personally, I like the current spellings as they let us know which is "know" and which is "now" (and "knot" or "not" and so on).

English is an international language. However, English is not the most important language in the West Germanic group of languages. Which language is the most important in the West Germanic group of languages? Why?

The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, Low Saxon languages and Yiddish.

German

German is spoken throughout a large area in central Europe, where it is the national language of Germany and of Austria and one of the three official languages of Switzerland (the others are French and Italian, and Romansh has a special status). From this homeland it has been carried by emigration to many other parts of the world; there are German-speaking communities in North and South America, South Africa, and Australia.

As a written language German is quite uniform, differing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no more than written English does in the United States and the British Commonwealth. As a spoken language, however, German exists in far more varieties than English. At one extreme is Standard German (Hochsprache), based on the written form of the language and used in radio, television, public lectures, the theatre, schools, and universities. It is relatively uniform, although speakers often reveal regional accents. At the other extreme are the local dialects, which differ from village to village. Between these two extremes there is a continuous scale of speech forms; in cities these forms are often close to the standard language and are called Colloquial German (Umgangssprache).

Dutch emerged as a structurally distinct branch of West Germanic as the result of language contact between speakers of North Sea Germanic and speakers of the South Germanic “Franconian,” or Frankish. The crucial early period of this contact occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries and resulted from the expansion of Frankish (Merovingian and early Carolingian) power into the western coastal areas that were populated by North Sea Germanic groups. The most important structural characteristic of Dutch is its strikingly anomalous development of i-umlaut; whereas in all other West and North Germanic languages, i-umlaut affected all nonfront vowels, in standard Dutch only ă shows umlaut fronting. In the dialects this limited development of umlaut is found only in the coastal areas (Flanders, Zeeland, Holland); eastern dialects show umlaut developments like those of the neighbouring German dialects and standard German.

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