For words such as ‘Knife’ and ‘Crumb’, they can easily just be spelt as Nife and Crum, right?
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In the case of knife, the word evolved from ancient German and Dutch words in which the K sound was actually spoken. In Anglo-Saxon times knife was written cnif and probably pronounced as ca-niff.
In the case of crumb (OE cruma/crome/crumme), it’s the result of hypercorrection — words initially only ending in -m that had an additional -b added in a mistaken attempt at consistency
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