At least in my dialect/accent of English
cough
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
Most “silent” letters have some effect on the pronunciation of the word. They aren’t there for no reason.
I’m sure that’s a regional way to pronounce it. I’ve lived in the south (North Carolina) my whole life and I’ve always heard and pronounced it as the same sound as caught, or aught.
In fact, according to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, both aught and ought have the same pronunciation.
Weird. It may sound subtle ( another weird word), but my mouth is definitely doing different things. Ought has a definite diphthong whereas aught may have one, but much more slight and with a more closed mouth.
Languages are weird.
Edit: aught is likely grown out of naught! I mean, that obviously makes sense, just never actually thought about it.
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.
