Learn English – Why is a ‘ph’ or ‘gh’ used instead of an ‘f’ in commonly used English words like Elephant and Enough

There are several reasons, three of which stand out:

1. If you keep the original spelling, connections with the same word used in other languages remain intact. In honest and psychology, for example, this makes it easier for people to communicate across English, French, Latin, Greek, etc. In German, they spell Zentrum. This makes it harder for us to remember how it is spelled, and sometimes this even makes it harder to learn the word for learners. Similarly, Dutch spells akkoord, which is again less consistent with many other languages and the language of origin, French.

2. It is terribly hard to get people to change the way they have always spelled words. Imagine if you had to change your spelling all of a sudden after having spelled a certain word the same way for 30 years! Or, what may be even worse, regular spelling changes occurring every 5 years, which nobody will be able to learn or keep up with, as in Dutch. And, even if you decide that something needs to change, there will be 1001 opinions as to how. Should it be onest? onnest? onnist? As it is, no spelling system in the world is wholly phonetic, not even new systems. Imagine you had to read a teks laik this, weh ai'uhv tsyowsin suhtin konvensyuhns.

3. How will you take into the account the fact that people in different regions pronounce the same word differently? Should all spelling be based on the phonetics of Received Pronunciation? Or should each region use its own spelling, making, say, British harder to read for Australians and vice versa?

The KIT vowel, /ɪ/, which we find in the word sit, and the FLEECE vowel, /i/, which we find in seat have different pronunciations in Southern Standard British English and General American. In Gen Am they are said with the jaw slightly more open than in British English. So a Gen Am /ɪ/ may sound more /e/-like to someone used to British English.

In the Western United states, the KIT vowel changes when it occurs before velar consonants /k, g/ or /ŋ/. We say that this new sound is an allophone of the KIT vowel for these speakers. When people who speak this variety of English have a KIT vowel before a velar consonant it becomes much more like a FLEECE vowel. It is longer and more close.

Because of this when these speakers say, for example the word sing, it will sound a lot like the word seeing to somebody who does not have the same accent. These speakers also have a different vowel in words like bag. Here again we have a velar consonant, /g/. These speakers will use a vowel that sounds like /eɪ/ to other listeners. For people listening, the word bag may seem to rhyme with the word plague.

These different possibilities for the vowels which occur in words like king and kin could be why the Original Poster finds these types of word confusing.

This article here talks about Western US vowels before velar consonants