@Steveb I've been looking it up and though has most recently been imported from Old Norse thó and thought remains the Germanic þhōt
@Steveb the Americans tried in the 1920s. Irish was worse with the silent letters but the spelling simplification lost some of the detail about the origin of the words. English spelling dates to 1600s Midlands pronunciation I think. English is just a bastardised amalgam of Brythionic, Godeilic, Latin, Greek, north German, Danish, Old Norse, French, Hindi and others with no rules or oversight.