e-i-g-h-t Is a Cruel Thing to Do to an 8-year-old

In Georgian, like quite a few languages save English, every letter in a word is pronounced. And there are a lot of letters in almost every Georgian word, especially when they are written with English letters. Two- and three-letter combinations, often all consonants, are used to express the sounds of letters that we do not have in the English alphabet.

For example,
დილა მშვიდობისა
sounds like dee-lah mshvee-doh-bee-sah,
which means good morning, but try lining up the "mshv" correctly at 9 a.m. before you've had your first cup of coffee (when you're 54 and a bit deaf; a bit daft as well, Nils would undoubtedly add).

ნახვამდის
sounds like nakh-vahm-dees,
which means good-bye, and requires "kh" from the same place in the throat where you gargle and "ah" as if you were fogging up a window from the inside.

ღრმაღელე  
or Ghrmaghele, is a metro stop that I hear pronounced over the train's public address system two times going to work and another two times coming home. I believe it is pronounced Grrr-mog-he-lay, where the "he" is like the "he" in "help". I like the straightforward Tony-the-Tiger "Grrr" with a silent h rolling into an m, but I bet a Georgian will instruct me to lighten up on the growling so that I can blow out an h with the g, like high, aghast, daughter, laugh, and aargh?!  

So some help I was in writing e-i-g-h-t on the board to help a boy in our first English class together tell me how old he was. I could see something like ee-eye-ga-ha-tee forming in his eyes. Realizing my cruelty, for the next student I erased "eight" and wrote "8", thinking that that would be easier to pronounce! Yeah, it's been more than five years since I've been in the classroom.

And what's with things down on the farm, like field, haystack, scarecrow, and farmhouse. How do you sound them out when you are eight-years-old? "Tractor" saved us all because it is pretty much the same in Georgian (ტრაქტორი) and Russian (трактор), but why did English change the k to c?