I Hate the Letter F

I haven't seen any non-lisp languages that give you that kind of power, for better or worse.

The letter F was originally the letter "waw" of the North-Semitic alphabet, then of the Phoenician alphabet derived from it.

In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter "waw" looked like a Y.

When some Greeks have derived the Greek alphabet, they have created two distinct letters from the letter "waw", the letter that was later named digamma, which retained the position in the alphabet of the Phoenician "waw", and the letter that was later named upsilon, which was appended immediately at the end of the alphabet, after the last of the Phoenician letters.

For unknown reasons, upsilon has kept the form Y, while the top of digamma has been rotated, becoming F.

The letter digamma has continued to be pronounced like in Phoenician, where it was used to write the consonant a.k.a. semivowel form of U (which in English is normally written as W). The letter upsilon was used to write the vowel form of U.

So the Greeks have created two letter variants of the original "waw", written as F and Y, to distinguish the consonant and vowel uses of U, like English has created W to be distinct from U, for the same purpose.

The letter E comes from the Phoenician "he", where it had a similar form, but it was reflected. The reason why the Greeks have reflected E is likely to be the change of the direction of writing from right-to-left to left-to-right. So it is in the Greek alphabet where E and F began to look similar.

Most Greek dialects have lost the semivowel U, therefore also the letter digamma, but that had not happened yet in the dialect from which the Etruscans and the Latins have taken the alphabet, so it still had F.

Latin had a consonant not present in Greek, that which now is written F. Because there was some resemblance between Latin F and semivowel U, both being labial, the Latins have chosen F to write this consonant. Moreover in Latin the form of Y has been simplified to V. Also Latin had both semivowel U and vowel U, but they have chosen to write both of them as V. The letter U has appeared only in the Middle Ages, initially only as the small letter "u", which was the small variant of "V", the forms "v" and "U" have been added later, together with the different pronunciations attached to the letters. Some centuries after the first variants of the Latin alphabet, the letter Y has been appended to it, because by that time the Greeks no longer pronounced it as U, but it had become a front rounded vowel, like German U-umlaut or French U or Danish Y.

Therefore the current Latin alphabet has 5 letters derived from Phoenician "waw": F, U, V, W and Y.

Later they have understood that writing with different letters minor variations in pronunciation of the same phoneme is useless, so they began to use C in almost all cases where previously either K or C or Q were used, but K and Q have survived for some niche uses.

The next complication has arisen in the Middle Ages, when in many European languages the pronunciation of C before E and I has been changed and instead of being the same as K it has become like the pronunciation of either English "s" or English "sh" or English "ch" or English "ts".

Because English has borrowed many words from a lot of languages, keeping their spelling, it has gathered all these pronunciations, so as you have pointed, all these different pronunciations are possible in English and it is unpredictable which of them must be used in a given word.