Comment by wazoox
About silent letters, French did the same, but one of the unintended consequences was to change pronunciation of many words when reading became common in the XIXth century. For instance "admirer, admiration" had a silent d before ~1830, which is now pronounced by everyone. Ditto the "ir" termination of verbs, the "r" was silent, that's why old songs have strange rhymes such as "Compère Guilleri" rhyming with "te lairas-tu mourir", and "les lilas sont fleuris" rhyming with "qu'il fait bon dormir".
And the r ending verbs like "parler" is still silent.