[brigandish]

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, the answer is closer than you think ;)

Whoever it was that decided “simplified” spellings were an improvement didn’t take into account how difficult they’d make pronunciation. I often hear highly educated Americans coming up with very strange ways to pronounce words, well beyond the normal realms of accent and variation, that are clearly the product of this. English spelling is bad enough but cutting out the hints to a word’s origin makes things worse, not better.