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thedeebo t1_je6xexd wrote

Reply to comment by noname942 in English is such an unreasonable language that spelling is a national sport by eldrolamam

It's "reasonable" if you know when and where the word was picked up. For most of the weird stuff, you can blame the French. English was a regular Germanic language before 1066.

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Its_justanick t1_je78tw4 wrote

And loanwords

And also the fact they adopted some spelling rules from Flemish

And the great vowel shift

And the fact that the spelling rules haven't been updated in so long.

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thedeebo t1_je79th9 wrote

I have to limit what I explain because I could drone on for a while about the history of the English language. I've found just blaming the French to be the most efficient way of explaining the situation.

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noname942 t1_je6ymwl wrote

> It's "reasonable" if you know when and where the word was picked up

Ok, let me stop you here, how tf am I supposed to know????? Does the average English speaker know? And even if so, English pronounciation has been evolving separately from spelling for centuries so it doesn't really matter.

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thedeebo t1_je77o9x wrote

Most native English speakers seem barely able to spell anything but the most basic words, so I doubt anyone besides weird nerds like me spend any time looking up word etymologies. We just memorize how to spell and speak, like anyone else does. We just have the advantage of having been totally immersed in it since infancy.

I'm sure you'd be unsurprised to learn that the evolution of English pronunciation is partially responsible for the weird spellings as well. The "gh" in "light" used to make the Germanic throat noise, but now it doesn't. Writing is a lot stickier than pronunciation. Everyone learned how to spell from writing that happened before pronunciation changed, so the spelling stuck around. The same thing happened in Romance languages when they started diverging from Classical Latin.

I could go on and on, but I'll save it for my ESL coworker who enjoys having esoteric conversations about linguistics.

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