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.
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The answer is the history of language. English is a trainwreck between older versions of German, Latin, French, Norse, and a few others. A smattering of Greek for good measure, and more than a few words we’ve picked up along the way from dozens of other languages.
And spelling is all over the place, having sourced from these languages or the people who first wrote down the translations for them over the course of 1500 years. Sounds evolve and shift from time to time but spellings tend to remain same or similar, which means that today we can look at spellings and (often) get a fair idea of which parent language the word came from and, sometimes, when it was adopted into English. A pretty neat silver lining on a very confusing cloud of mixups! This fact also helps explain why we have so many homonyms and homophones that are either unrelated or which have no obvious relationship (the answer being either complete coincidence or a common ancestor word that was routed two different ways through two different daughter-languages before being rejoined in English).
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