system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's the reason behind unpronounced letters?

Started to wonder when thinking about the word 'beaucoup' (french for 'much'). There's languages where words are very long for how much is actually being pronounced. Is it just speakers being too "lazy" over a long time? But why hasn't the written word followed along?
gpt
Pronunciation is historically much more variable than writing. This is because writing a word down creates an easily consulted "record" of how that word is to be spelled (even if not everyone agrees with you), whereas -- before broadcast media and sound recording came along -- there was no way to "remind" a group of speakers how a word is to be pronounced.

Seeing a word spelled out can indicate how it is to be pronounced, but in areas of low education and literacy, and especially before the era of printing, this is not particularly effective.

Because of this, it tends to be easy for pronunciations to drift over time and between regions, so much so that spellings began to look nonsensical compared to spoken language. Some languages have simplified their spelling to correct this, while others have not.

Another contributing factor is the borrowing of words from other languages, sometimes with those other languages' spelling rules, which are illogical in the context of the new "host" language.

French has a lot of silent letters, but in many ways is more logical in its pronunciation than English is. Read this list of words, all of which are identical except for the first letter, aloud to yourself: bough, cough, dough, rough. You can imagine the processes that led to these words being pronounced differently.