‘Silenc’ project exposes the silent letters we never really say

The Roman alphabet is an unwieldy vessel for the multitude of sounds in many Western languages, and this is exemplified by the phenomenon of silent letters — for example, the vestigial “k” in the word “knife.” The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design has shown off an “optimized language” to demonstrate their prevalence, calling it Silenc. It’s designed to answer the question of what written language looks like when you take the spoken silence away.

The silent letters in works by Hans Christian Andersen are identified by algorithms and highlighted in red so that they disappear when viewed through a filter. The effect seems somewhat unnatural and confusing when applied to a text in the reader’s native language, but can provide new insight into different languages that have applied different historical influences to the same script.