At least in my dialect/accent of English
Most “silent” letters have some effect on the pronunciation of the word. They aren’t there for no reason.
The oddities of the English language will lead you down a strange and fascinating historical rabbit hole. It’s great reading, but be ready to spend some time.
tl;dr once upon a time everyone spelled words guided only by vibes, then spelling was standardised-ish, then after that there was a great vowel shift where the now standard-ish spelling became less intuitive. add the linguistic influence from French and latin (sprinkle in some germanic & a pinch of skandinavian), add the power balance between classes favouring fancier words (the nobles ate pork, beef, poultry, the peasants tended to pigs, cows, chickens). add some more stuff and there you go! a “functional” language of Anglonic Britonic English!
I would highly recommend the History of English Podcast. This particular observation made by OP is thoroughly covered in this particular episode: https://youtu.be/T0ED-FV7O50
I remember seeing a standup comedian late 80s or early 90s refer to ghoti as an alternate spelling for fish. Just looked it up, and it dates back to the 19th century.
You take the sound gh makes in laugh, the sound of o in women, and the to from dictionary. F-I-SH.
They’re not silent letters, they’re modifiers. They modify the sound of surrounding letters. An example of a silent letter would be the P in psychology (in the English language only).
Similar to this:
The french word for squirrel (écureuil) is equally hard for English speakers to pronounce as the English word is for French speakers
(I would also add that most English words with two R’s are hard for French speakers; mirror, error and the like)
The German word for squirrel (Eichhörnchen) is hard to pronounce for French and English speakers in different ways.
Though I have to admit squirrel/écureuil is the cooler pair because it seems to me they both derive from the same root but divererged in a way to make them difficult to pronounce for the other one.
