Every Letter Is Silent, Sometimes.

English is traced back to Scots-Irish and Germanic languages, but is famous for being particularly good for engineering and business applications, due to it having so few rules it can easily adopt new terms at will. Computer languages, for example, often invent their own terms and the English language adopts countless new technical terms all the time. Part of the reason it can adopt so many terms and has so few hard and fast rules, is because the English language is normally taught as having only one grammar, when it has two, and you could say the entire language and culture are biased towards making money. The two grammars compensate for high error rates, but by only acknowledging the existence of one grammar they promote the ideas of common sense and conventional wisdom, or organizing along the lines of a flock of chickens. Two hundred years ago, a flock of chickens was about as good as it gets, and most people were lucky if they knew how to read or traveled farther than two hundred miles from home.