Why do we mispronounce the sound “e” in the word write?

Silent e is a writing convention in English spelling. A silent letter e at the end of a word often signals a specific pronunciation of the preceding vowel letter, as in the difference between "rid" /ˈrɪd/ and "ride" /ˈraɪd/. This orthographic pattern followed the phonological changes of the Great Vowel Shift in late Middle English. This difference is often described with the terms "short vowel" and "long vowel," even though the differences are in sound rather than duration. The terms originated in studies of the Great Vowel Shift, where the differences in vowel length were actual differences in duration.[citation needed] Analysis of common spellings and pronunciations shows that the "silent e" most often—but not without exceptions—signals a different phoneme than a word spelled without it.

56. Why do we study the Basic Word Stock? Prepare a table of the Basic Word Stock and give examples to each point
Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogenous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words. In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.

The term native denotes words which belong to the original English stock known from the earliest manuscripts of the Old English period. They are mostly words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles in the 5th century by Germanic tribes.

Linguists estimate the Anglo-Saxon stock of words as 25-30 per cent of the English vocabulary. The native word-stock includes the words of Indio-European origin and the words of Common Germanic origin. They belong to very important semantic groups.

The words of Indio-European origin (that is those having cognates in other I-E. languages) form the oldest layer. They fall into definite semantic groups: terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother; words denoting the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, water, wood, hill, stone, tree; names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf; parts of human body: arm, eye, foot, heart; the verbs: bear, come, sit, stand, etc; the adjectives: hard, quick, slow, red, white.

The words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. words having cognates in German, Norwegian, Dutch and other Germanic languages are more numerous. This part of the native vocabulary contains a great number of semantic groups. Examples: the nouns are: summer, winter, storm, ice, rain, group, bridge, house, shop, room, iron, lead, cloth, hat, shirt, shoe, care, evil, hope, life, need, rest; the verbs are: bake, burn, buy, drive hear, keep, learn, make, meet, rise, see, send, shoot, etc; the adjectives are: broad, dead, deaf, deep. Many adverbs and pronouns belong to this layer, though small in number (25-30 per cent of the vocabulary).

57. Why do we mispronounce "b" in the word "climb"?
In principle, the story begins in late Middle English. At that time, consonantal groups were often simplified. Solemn and column are now pronounced without n. In the speech of some people kiln is homophonous with kill, g is always mute in diaphragm, phlegm, and so forth. Because of the simplification, lamb was fleeced of its historical final b; today b is retained in spelling but not in pronunciation. The same happened to jamb, plumb, and tomb (borrowed words), along with womb (Old Engl. wamba “belly”; compare Wamba, the name of Cedric’s “fool” in Ivanhoe) and climb (Old Engl. climban). As long as the simplification of consonantal groups remained an active force, literate people felt uncertain when to write m, as opposed to mb, and began to add b to m gratuitously, a mistake (here, reverse spelling) called hypercorrection. This accounts for the modern forms limb and crumb. So the b is silent in climb, climbs, climbed, and even climber. The word no longer ends in mb, but the b is still silent because the original root word ended in mb. It isn't unusual that words with surprising pronunciations are quite old. This set of 'mb' words has been around for quite a long time, most of them since Middle, or even Old English. Middle English was spoken from the 11th to the 15th century, and Old English started way back in the 5th century.

58. Why do we mispronounce "t" in the word "listen"?
The “t” in many words is silent because it’s too difficult or awkward to pronounce and has become assimilated into the surrounding consonants. Let’s start with a little etymology. Some verbs with silent “t”—like “soften” and “moisten”—were created when the suffix “-en” was added to an earlier adjective ending in “st” or “ft.” In the case of “fasten,” the ending was added even before the verb came into English from old Germanic languages. But the root is still the adjective “fast,” meaning stable or fixed.

A couple of similar verbs are special cases. “Listen” originally had no “t” (it was spelled lysna in Old English), but it acquired a “t” by association with the archaic synonym “list.” And “hasten” is merely an extended form of the old verb “haste,” formed by analogy with the other “-en” verbs. As we said in our blog posting about “often,” the word can be properly pronounced either with or without a “t” sound. The “t” had long been silent but it came back to life in the 19th century with the rise of literacy, when people seemed to feel that each letter in a word should be sounded. For some reason this didn’t happen with “soften,” whose “t” is always silent. And in the other verbs we mentioned—“moisten,” “fasten,” “listen,” “hasten” —the “t” is invariably silent, never pronounced. Similarly, the “t” disappears when we pronounce words like “castle,” “christen,” “epistle,” “glisten,” “nestle,” “pestle,” and others. It’s a good bet that if a word ends in “-sten,” “-ften,” or “-stle,” the “t” will be silent. Why? We found an answer in a paper published more than a century ago. The article, “On ‘Silent T’ in English,” by James W. Bright, appeared in the journal Modern Language Notes in January 1886. As Bright explains, the “t” in these words is an acoustically “explosive” one, and to sound it after an “s” or an “f”—both of which expend “considerable breath”—is “especially difficult and obscure.” Consequently the “t” sound is assimilated into its surroundings and becomes silent. However, the “t” sound persists in some other words spelled with “-stl” and “-ftl,” like “lastly,” “justly,” “mostly,” “shiftless,” “boastless,” and others.

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