This is true for a lot of words and I don’t understand what the point of including letters if they’re not supposed to be pronounced.
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> I don’t understand what the point of including letters if they’re not supposed to be pronounced.
As an American who grew up learning English as a first language the whole weird spelling thing never really made much sense to me either. But, as I learned a bit of Japanese in college, I had a bit of a revelation… the English “spelling” system is just a different take on those symbolic “Hanzi/Kanji” systems like China and Japan use.
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Pronunciation isn’t always perfectly uniform, and it evolves and changes over time. This leaves two options: constantly evolving spellings (with regional differences), or standardized spellings (where spelling isn’t necessarily a prescription for pronunciation). English mostly chose the second path.
What this means is that “pecan” refers to one specific type of nut regardless of whether folks pronounce it pih-KAHN, pee-KAHN, or PEE-can where you live… but it does mean that “the written word” and “the spoken word” are kinda two different things that you have to memorize how they mesh together (not all that differently from how Chinese folks do with their characters).
These “silent letters” and whatnot are a huge pain to have to memorize (similar to those thousands of symbols Asian folks have to learn) but once you do have it down it is relatively powerful in that we can distinguish different meanings even between homophones. Reading a page, we can know that “ewe” and “you” are referring to two different concepts – we can read “pyromaniac” versus “pie-row maniac” and realize one refers to an arsonist-type whereas the other is presumably a fan of dessert-based combat.
Essentially, English spelling is a process of freezing loanwords’ spellings so that we can treat the words (or at least the word-roots) as shared symbols despite evolving and diverging pronunciations.
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