I tried asking my English teacher back in school but even she did not have an answer.
In: 157
Some letters were added in English in an attempt to bring the spelling closer to Latin, which was the language of educated people. Because of this S was inserted in “island”, and B was added to “debt”.
There are a few reasons.
1. English is a collection of words borrowed from, or inspired by, many other languages, so many of our words are spelled in a way that makes more sense in a different language.
2. Standardized spelling is actually rather recent, so for a long time, people just spelled words however made sense to them, and eventually, some of those spellings became the standard.
3. In some cases, we *did* at one time pronounce those letters, but the way we speak evolves a lot faster than how we spell.
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Unlike French, German and Dutch, the English language doesn’t have the history of language reform.
In the early 20th century a lot of language reform was done in the Netherlands to simplify the language and reduce the number of ways a word pronounced should be written (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschiedenis_van_de_Nederlandse_spelling#Spelling-Marchant and further).
In the 1996 the German language was made more consistent (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duitse_spellingwijziging_van_1996) and in France the Académie française takes care of it (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise)
For English, things were proposed many times but never really implemented (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform: English is the only one of the top ten major languages with no associated worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate spelling changes. )
Spoken language changes much faster than written language. For many words, when the written form of the word was first established they *did* pronounce those letters. Language has simply adopted a different pronunciation over the last few hundred years.