I'm of French descent. My family name has nine letters and three of them are not pronounced. Dozens of different spellings exist for my family name.
French is my first language and I think it was made complicated on purpose, as far as spelling and grammar are concerned. I almost takes a college degree to have a decent orthograph. As if the French royalty and the Catholic Church wanted it to be as complicated as possible so that the smallest number of people could master it. A way to control information, a form of encryption.

Even French people in the same family will spell their last names differently but pronounce them the same. Mine has 3 different spellings in one generation.(my grandfather's)