Anybody who knows me more than in passing, knows I have no love of or respect for the current orthography of English. English went through a number of major changes starting in the Early Middle English period (roughly 1100 CE) and ending with the double whammy of the great vowel shift in the Late Middle English and the early Modern English periods and the invention of the printing press. The great vowel shift was responsible for given us the reassignment of cardinal vowel values (a, e, i, o, u) from those in many European languages to those which we have to teach our children when they learn to spell. Especially pernicious are the so-called long vowels, three of which are diphthongs, one of which is a triphthong, and finaly one of which is an actual long vowel, (though it is not quantity that distinguishes it from its short counterpart but quality): (ā /eɪ/, ē /i:/, ī /aɪ/, ō /oʊ/, ū /jʊw/). The part about the printing is that printing was introduced to England at the time when great changes in the pronunciation and grammar of the language were taking place. Also, there is a conservative tendency in spelling to preserve etymological features even after phones have changed drastically. Things like the final e, which was still pronounced as a reduced vowel or schwa in the Middle English period, that partially marked what remained of the Old English case system, became in Modern English a kind of indicator of the pronunciation of the vowel in the previous syllable, e.g., cod, code. Then there are letters that were not being pronounced, but were written because there was a desire to spell things in such a way as to indicate their etymological origin in Latin, e.g., the c in perfect. When we borrowed the French word parfit (at the time, the final t was pronounced), there was no c in it, but soon the spelling became perfect, but still pronounced parfit, but nowadays the c is pronounced. Another favorite of mine is admiral. Here the d not only was not pronounced when the word was borrowed, but is unetymological as the word is ultimately the Arabic (cognate with our word emir). Folks with little Latin and less Greek, assumed that amiral was based on a Latin word, and since they knew that words coming in from French usually lacked the etymological d in the prefix ad- (e.g., aventure, adventire), they stuck one in where it did not belong, and now it is pronounced because there has been a tendency towards pronounced letters that were silent earlier, e.g., often is now commonly pronounced with the t, so much so that I am occasionally corrected when I use the older, preferred pronunciation without the t.

Ceci n'est pas un seing.