Timwi wrote:
And here I am trying very hard to understand how someone can think that a word that is pronounced the way "renowned" is, can possibly have a k in it. It is not even pronounced anything like "know" or "knowledge". Furthermore, as "gnostic" versus "agnostic" clearly teaches us, letters do not tend to become silent when there is a prefix before them.
Here is the best way to understand it: English spelling and pronunciation are highly irregular. When a person is "world renowned" then they are _known_ around the world.
Since "know" and "knowledge" have a silent 'k', then adding a prefix would not _make_ the k silent, it would merely _leave_ the k silent. The fact that "know" and "knowledge" sound different from "renowned" isn't really helpful, since they sound different from _each other_, and it is quite common for variants of English words to be pronounced differently for no apparent reason.
A German and I once had a very confusing conversation at a restaurant in Austria surrounding the word "dough". A certain item on the menu was a piece of meat surrounded by duff, apparently. Hmm? What's that? Interesting food these Austrians eat. Unfortunately, when I got the meat and ate it it was tuff, and I had to coff.
My daughter recently asked Danny why the word 'receipt' has a 'p' in it. Well, he gave a decent answer but I think he made it up out of thin air. That's the best that most of us can do, even very well educated and smart people.
--Jimbo