about the silent “h” in the names of some towns in the U.S. It seems that some government office many, many years ago decided that the “h” in places like Pittsburgh and Plattsburgh and other towns wasn’t necessary and, in fact, it slowed down the mail (they claimed) and so they took it off of official documents. But Pittsburgh decided that this government office could do what they wanted for purposes of maps, but that they, by God, were keeping their ‘h’! Other towns have followed suit over the years.

I am not sure this answers your question but I thought it was an interesting bit of synchronicity that you asked the question right around the time I heard the story!

A while back, I was trying to learn German, and I was surprised to learn that many of their words were the same as ours, but they pronounced the k’s that are silent to us.

At least, I remember that the word for knee sounded like “k”nee, and I just loved that!

I figured, they must have been their words first!

_{This is a very unofficial answer…}

Had to butt in on this one ;-)

Actually, the English language isn’t making up letters just for the fun of it. The letters we don’t pronounce are “left-overs” from past stages of the language. Whatever we see but can’t hear is a reminder of what once was :) That means for example that all the k’s used to be pronounced at one point through history. Now I’m not familiar enough with the history of the English language to tell you when and how the shift happened exactly, but if you dig down, you could find out some fun phonological rule about how it all came about (phonology is about the “sound rules” in our minds… like for example, someone with a strong Spanish accent would say they come from “Espain” because there’s a subconscious rule saying that an “s” in initial position is always preceded by an “e”... :) ).

The thing is, language is constantly evolving. We just don’t always notice the process happening because it happens naturally. But these changes are oral ones, passing from one person to another, first locally, and then eventually, they will spread. Hence the growing differences between various varieties of English.
The “problem” is that the written language doesn’t follow as readily. Because it’s a code we all agree on, and there needs to be some sort of consensus about the code that we all share. And the people in charge of making and eventually reforming those rules are usually puritans (in the sense that they resist changes), and will therefore fight hard to keep things as they are (and “have always been” as they think, which is totally wrong, because language never stands still). And Americans have been more “modern” about these reforms than Brits have been, hence the growing differences :)

If you ask me, I think these things are fun :) I like that I can still guess the origin of a word based on its orthography (and as Mulya points out, still see the connections with related languages). I like the historical baggage that follows with it :) But from a practical point of view, it sucks, no doubt. Learning to spell would be a whole lot easier if orthography and pronunciation matched :)
“Ouch! I nocked my nee with the nife!” :-p