Why does the English language have so many words where one or more letters are silent. For example why couldn’t “Knife” be simply written as nife or whatever combination of letters that make pronunciation obvious.

Question

Why does the English language have so many words where one or more letters are silent. For example why couldn’t “Knife” be simply written as nife or whatever combination of letters that make pronunciation obvious.

In: 2529

Answer 1

Not a single “answer” actually answers the question. They are not asking why these words have arbritrary silent letters, they are asking why these letters haven’t yet been removed to reflect modern pronounciations, since keeping them around seems redundant and unintuitive.