For words such as ‘Knife’ and ‘Crumb’, they can easily just be spelt as Nife and Crum, right?
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Short answer is that for all of these words, most of the time it is because they used to be pronounced differently, so the “silent” letters made sense.
Languages changes constantly, there is no one “correct” version of any language. Sounds get changed, added and removed from words all the time, and it happens very naturally.
The *spelling* of words doesn’t change quite as quickly, since it’s important that someone reading this text in 100 years time can still understand it, even if the way it is said has changed in that time.
“Knife” was indeed at one point in time pronounced closer to “Cuh-nife”. The sound of words *tends* to change towards pronunciations which are more efficient, without losing the meaning. The hard “Kuh” at the start of Knife and the hard “Buh” at the end of Crumb makes these words harder to say; there’s an extra syllable. So over time, it was dropped.
Edit: Although looking at another comment, it seems I’m partially mistaken on the B, and in some cases this was added to spellings by scholars who were trying to make a more uniform language, and in other cases were trying to revise English spellings to be more like the original Latin ones.
It’s worth remember that up until 500-ish years ago the number of people who could read the language was small, and the number of people who were tasked with actually *writing* was even smaller again. So a small number of people could very easily make individual decisions that would change the entire language for centuries to come.
If you or I choose to write “nife” from now on, it won’t make a difference. But if a monk in the 1400s decides that he’s going to write “Lamb of God” instead of “Lam of Gode” from now on, then that could become the new standard.
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