Gaagaagiins
I definitely don’t have so deep an understanding as to give the kind of examples I can in English or Japanese, but broadly speaking, such “silent letters” usually do point to outmoded historical pronunciations. English, as you know, has an absolute ton of these: what’s up with “knight”, well originally it was spoken closer to kuh-nick-tuh. The second-most common (and overlapping) cause has to do with sound change, a constant and unavoidable process in all language, such as the yotsugana in Japanese or the Great Vowel Shift in English. I can recall my mentor in lectures pointing out similar historical changes in Korean but I did not have the knowledge to really memorize it; in theory if I call up my alma mater’s IT department and get into my old account I think I would still have the digital slides in there? A project for someday.
Maybe I am just crazy in thinking writing systems should endeavor to more rigorously represent the spoken word. Are there Korean linguists who advocate for developing a diacritic or something to denote letters within words that are accepted as being correct spellings, yet are not generally voiced in contemporary speech?
So: there are a lot of reasons modern linguists generally disavow ourselves of talking about spelling, but dictionary authors usually do try to rigorously model the speech of their time— but that’s just it, you can only ever capture a brief window of time, because language is constantly changing. Spoken American English in our lifetimes is on track to replace a majority of vowels with schwas, which will— at least for a time— render most of our dictionaries anachronistic. The only possible alternative is to have a governmental body that regulates national spellings— and when it’s been attempted, such groups have never been able to keep up with the rate of language change, fail to capture language as it’s actually spoken, and tend to be resented by the speakers, as chazumaru can probably attest.
(BTW, it’s funny that you mention diacritics, because despite pop culture jokes about umlauts, let me tell you there’s absolutely no consistent method for applying them among linguists; even with something like IPA in the internet age, you read a deep dive phonology paper and your first task is to decode how this author is using them because by nature the rubric is vague for anything less than numerically measured waveforms.)
