5 Answers

  Why don't we always pronounce words the way we spell them? One reason is that the English language has changed a lot. If you could take a time machine back to the time of "Brave Heart" and knights in armor, you would not be able to understand what people were saying. Their English would sound like a foreign language.

Back in those days, people spelled words the way they sounded. For example, the "k" in "knee" and in "knight" used to be pronounced. And once upon a time, the final "e" in most words (such as "made") was pronounced.

These old-fashioned spellings were "frozen" with the invention of the printing press. (Before the printing press, people used to have to write everything out by hand — no typewriters, no word processors!) People changed the way they said words, but did not change the way they spelled words.

Another source of strange spelling is foreign words. Some English words are borrowed from other languages, such as Latin and Greek. These languages have "silent" letters or different sounds from English. For example, Greek has letters and sounds we do not use, such as the "rh" in "rhythm" (we say "rithim").

http://www.protrainco.com/essays/spelling.htm

We spell it K-nee but we don't K-now why...

Well,I don't "K"now!

The English language if rife with grammatical irregularities. Silent letters like in:

Doubt,debt,psychiatrist,iron,bought,drought...the list is endless.

Check out the word 'ghoti' in www. wikipedia.org/wiki/ghoti . It spells 'fish'.