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

Because the language contains within it the history of the words it uses. This is a cultural thing, many people (including me) think it is good to embody the history of the language in the language itself.

By the same token you could say, why do we have old buildings when we could knock them down and build new better organised ones? Why not get rid of all those curvy winding streets in our towns and replace them with nice straight ones?