English suffers from adopting a lot of words from other languages. We got a mix of Germanic, French, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and for the US English, whatever butchery the Brits did/do. (See: The Great vowel shift and Soccer) You smash all those languages together and then let the Brits spend a few hundred years mangling everything and see what you get for rules.
Today English is still willing to file the serial numbers off of any cool sounds and claim as our own. So, Damn the Rules! It makes for interesting words.
But I still blame the French for no other reason than I can.
I also forgot about the early Dutch press operators that old Bill Caxton hired that gave us the silent h in words like ghost because that was close to ghast. And wh got added because they thought it looked better the the standard hw that was common at the time. Ok, that one is kind of a wash.
The standardization of spelling that printing presses require added a nasty list of silent letters to the English language that weren’t there before thanks to those early press operators.
English suffers from adopting a lot of words from other languages. We got a mix of Germanic, French, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and for the US English, whatever butchery the Brits did/do. (See: The Great vowel shift and Soccer) You smash all those languages together and then let the Brits spend a few hundred years mangling everything and see what you get for rules.
Today English is still willing to file the serial numbers off of any cool sounds and claim as our own. So, Damn the Rules! It makes for interesting words.
But I still blame the French for no other reason than I can.
It also didn’t help that English was standardizing its spelling as the Great Vowel Shift was occurring
I also forgot about the early Dutch press operators that old Bill Caxton hired that gave us the silent h in words like ghost because that was close to ghast. And wh got added because they thought it looked better the the standard hw that was common at the time. Ok, that one is kind of a wash.
The standardization of spelling that printing presses require added a nasty list of silent letters to the English language that weren’t there before thanks to those early press operators.