Q: Silent letters in English?

[Joel S. Berson]

A correspondent asks:
>Can anyone think of a word in *English* in which any of the
>following is silent? (Looking it up online is cheating--and, if the
>word is a transplant from another language, it needs to have been
>borrowed far enough back to be considered native.) f, j, q, s, v, x, z?

I suspect a few more can be removed, but I'm merely a ferociously
competitive antedater.  I could suggest f as in Ffoliot -- surely the
second f is not pronounced!  (Except in ... what sketch is it?
Flanders and Swan? Monte Python?)

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org