They're not strangely pronounced. They're strangely
spelled. And every English word is strangely spelled, since English spelling was developed for a different language, and doesn't work very well on modern English. At all. Spelling English words correctly is such a rare phenomenon, in fact, that the National Spelling Bee is front-page news in the United States. Speakers of languages with reasonable orthographies like Finnish or German are always amazed at this. —
John Lawler Jun 2 '13 at 16:24