The Hidden Time Cost of French's Silent Letters

As many of you might already know, a distinct characteristic of the French language is its silent letters - letters that we faithfully jot down, but never voice. These silent custodians of French grammar may never echo in our speech, but they play a vital role in the structure and order of our words.

Now, you might wonder, "Virginie, they are just silent letters. How much of an impact could they possibly make?" Well, fasten your seatbelts because you're about to be taken on a surprising journey.

For a bit of fun and curiosity, I decided to tackle a 'Fermi problem', aiming to quantify how much human time is lost globally to those sneaky silent French letters. Of course, this required a few educated guesses along the way.

Please note that this exercise is approximate and will involve some guesswork.

Step 1: Unpronounced Letters in French

French does have silent letters, but it's challenging to come up with a precise average number. One common estimate suggests that around 20% of letters in the French language are silent, based on common silent endings like "-ent" in verbs, "-e" in many words, and other such patterns.

Step 2: Number of French Speakers

According to Ethnologue, there are approximately 77.2 million native French speakers. We also have to consider second language speakers. The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie estimates this number to be around 204.6 million people. Thus, the total estimated number of French speakers is around 281.8 million.

Step 3: Average Number of Letters Typed per Day

This can vary widely, but let's consider a very rough estimate. Let's assume an average native person types around 950 words per day (emails, social media, work, messages, etc.), and a second language speaker around 50, a total of 1000 words, with an average of 4 letters per word. That gives us about 4,000 letters per person per day.

Step 4: Average Time to Type a Letter

On average, a person can type around 40 words per minute. If we consider an average of 4 letters per word, that's about 160 letters per minute, or approximately 2.6 letters per second. So, to type a single letter, it would take about 0.38 seconds for an average typist..

Step 5: Calculation

Let's put it all together:

First, we calculate the number of silent letters typed per day:

Number of silent letters typed per day = 0.2 (silent letter ratio) * 4,000 (letters per day) * 281,800,000 (French speakers) = 225440000000 letters

Then we calculate the total time lost per day due to typing these silent letters:

Time lost per day = 225.44 billion letters * 0.38 seconds per letter = 85667200000 seconds

Converted to hours, this would equate to 23796444.44 hrs

So, according to these rough estimates, about 23.79 million hours are "lost" every day due to typing unpronounced letters in French.

This means that the average French speaker spends around 304 seconds, or 5.06 minutes, each day just typing out silent letters.

Incredibly, this translates to about 2716.48 years of typing silent letters in just a single day!

That's right. In one day, we, the global community of French speakers, would have spent a mind-boggling 2716 years typing out letters that we don't even pronounce.

And just think, all that time we spend typing silent letters, we could have been doing something else! Imagine the books we could have read, the croissants we could have eaten, the naps we could have taken! Perhaps it's time for a petition? "Liberté, égalité, moins de lettres muettes!"