2754: Island, Isle, and Aisle Jul 5, 2024

 In French, an island is ‘île’, reflecting that it lost the ‘-s-’ in its pronunciation from the Latin ‘insula’, but it is present—though silent—in the English ‘isle’. This was a deliberate reintroduction to make the word more closely resemble Latin, never meant to reflect the pronunciation. This reintroduction of the 'S' has led to some curious misconceptions in the English language. Words like "aisle" and "island" never originally contained an 'S' in any stage of their history, originating from Germanic words. However, due to their phonetic and lexical similarities to ‘isle’, they were mistakenly given a silent 'S,' despite having no etymological basis for it.