This is so complicated! I have always wondered why some words in English don't make sense. I'm not a native speaker, my mother tongue is Slovak. We read exactly what we write and this is so different to English. I only studied English for 4 years but I used to work for an American company for over 9 years so I learned how to pronounce properly. However there are still some words that I have to think about and pronounce incorrectly very often :)
I'm glad to read the history around pronunciation as now I understand how come that it sometimes simply doesn't make sense :)
Thank you for sharing and have a lovely day!