They were denoting actually pronounced sounds, but French tended to swallow the word endings, which in time resulted in everything after stressed syllable being dropped (and this also resulted in French always having accent on the last syllable).

its the wine talking.

English isn't any better when it comes to spelling. It's terribly inconsistent and in desperate need of several reforms.

They were afraid the Germans next door would seem smarter due to the longer word lengths, but didn't want to have such difficulties pronouncing everything, so they chose a compromise by just making words look longer than they actually are.

Eaux

There has never been a more malicious act of linguistic inbreeding sabotage than the French bastardizing Latin with German and then body-horroring their spelling abominations on to English.