I was under the impression that because ‘witch’ ends with a /tʃ/ sound, the ‘t’ is not silent but directly represents an essential element of the pronunciation.
However, a word game (the New York Times game “Connections”) recently claimed that it’s a silent t and I’m seeing multiple people online also claiming that it’s a silent t. As far as I can tell, their reasoning is based on the fact that other words represent the /tʃ/ sound with a mere ‘ch’ spelling (no ‘t’)—e.g., ‘approach’, ‘attach’, ‘birch’. But I would have thought the proper conclusion from that fact is just that English doesn't always use the letter ‘t’ when representing the /t/ sound orthographically (see also ‘hence’, ‘defense’, ‘pizza’), much as it doesn’t always use the letter ‘d’ when representing the /d/ sound (e.g., ‘gel’, ‘jazz’, ‘Taoism’), and so on for other letters and sounds.
So is there another argument for thinking that ‘witch’ has a silent t? Am I wrong about the argument I mentioned? Or is it a mistake to say that ‘witch’ has a silent t? Thanks!
EDIT: I’ll note another question which simply presupposes without argument that ‘witch’ has a silent t, and asks for the origin of ‘tch’ spellings. In general, the discussion doesn’t attempt to provide any reasons for or against this presupposition. The only exception is a downvoted answer claiming that it’s not a silent t because words spelled with a mere ‘ch’ (allegedly) exhibit a small difference in pronunciation (less sharp, more d-like than t-like). The rest of the discussion is about whether certain words spelled with ‘tch’ and ‘ch’ are pronounced with the same sound, about why the letter ‘t’ may occur in the spelling of certain words, and about historical variant spellings of the example words. Again, there is no attempt to prove or disprove the presupposition.
EDIT #2: I’ve already explained why the other question simply isn’t relevant to my question. I don’t know why my question has been closed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.