Word-Hoard...Knight

Have you ever wondered why we pronounce "knight" the way we do? We have left out the sounds of several letters.

The word is derived from the Old English cniht which meant manservant. The Anglo-Saxons would have pronounced each letter: the "c" was hard and flowed into the "n"; the "i" would have been pronounced like a long "e" (Old English was before the Great Vowel Shift which I'll get to another time); the "h" was gutteral ending in a sharp "t" at the end.

After the Norman Conquest the English language took on many French influences. We have to assume that the Normans would have heard the Anglo-Saxons pronounce "cniht." When the Normans wrote down the word, they spelled it phonetically in French.

Later (after the Great Vowel Shift) we became lazy and didn't want to go through all of the contortions of mouth and tongue necessary to pronounce it the Old English way. Thus, we  have a six-letter word with only three sounds.