I tried asking my English teacher back in school but even she did not have an answer.
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Someone who owned a US newspaper simplified the spelling of many words. Many of his simplifications caught on and some didn’t. It is why some words are spelled differently in the US and England. I think that color and colour is one word like that.
Because at one point, some of them used to be pronounced. Here’s an example of Middle English from the 14th century (Geoffrey Chaucer’s *The Canterbury Tales*)
Notice that “drought,” “night,” etc. have a GH sound where the modern word doesn’t. “Knight” also has a K sound at the beginning: “k’nEEcht”
By the time spelling was standardized, that sound was gone—but the words had been spelled with a GH for so long, they just sorta kept it anyway.
Because English is 3 languages sitting on top of each other under a trenchcoat, pretending to be one language. A lot of things don’t make sense.
There’s a lot of great answers here (specifically about island) but another reason is because English spelling isn’t primarily about pronunciation — it’s about meaning. We use morphemes (smallest parts of words that have meaning — the word “fastest” has too morphemes — the base “fast” and the suffix “est”) to add comprehensibility to the word, even if it’s not reflected in pronunciation. Morphemes are why we can have so many long words — antidisestablishmentarianism (a favorite of mine as a kid) has a base of “establish” and then lots of prefixes and suffixes added on that change the meaning and type of the base word.
Psyche- is a base that means mind (from Latin, with a Greek origin). Although we don’t say the p, having it there helps you understand words like psychology (study of minds), psychodrama (a drama that involves a lot of interiority). In other languages like the original Greek, it’s pronounced /ps/ but English doesn’t like having that sound begin words (we don’t mind it at the end, like the words sips), so it’s pronounce /s/.
English also has lots of homonyms like “piece” and “peace” or “know” and “no” — we use different spelling to make clear which word is which. We then use those base words to make other words (knowledge, piecemeal) that relate to the meaning of the base.
This morphological approach, combined with the many words English got from other languages with different rules for pronunciation and spelling, leads to a language where spelling is a poor guide for pronunciation, but gives you lots of other info about words. If you have other specific words you’re interested in, etymonline is a really great resource for any word you might be wondering about.
English is not a language of unique origin. Certainly not American English. Rather, a collection of words most commonly used from other more unique languages, if not languages with distinct origins.
What letters are silent in one language are not in others, some words that should have had silent letters were spoken with the letter by mistake, opinions about what words should sound like changed, and the spelling of words changed over time.
Before the printing press, spelling was loose at best or personal preference at its worse.
Also you can see this transition through other languages, for example the French and German version of the word “psychology” still pronounces the “p”.
Many English words come from Latin, Greek and other languages. Sometimes the way they are spelled indicates which family the word comes from or they kept the way the word is spelled in the borrowed language.
There’s a few reasons.
Sometimes it’s because they come from different languages that have different pronunciation rules. That’s why Americans don’t pronounce the h in herb, they’re borrowing the French pronunciation.
Sometimes it’s because the letter used to be pronounced but the pronunciation changed and the spelling didn’t. The k in knight used to be pronounced, so that’s why it’s spelled with a K.
And sometimes it’s just a regional dialect thing.
English got a lot of these from French, and back in the day scribes in France were paid by the letter so they added letters to get paid more.
Loads of Americans seem incapable of pronouncing “t” in words. “Waer” instead of water. Etc.
This happens all the time and leads to… silent letters.
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