anymany 2022-05-31 19:49:57

my biggest gripe with English is just the lack of consistency, you are ON a bike, but you're ON a bus? not IN?

there's the I before E except after C like "grief" and "field" except for "beige" or "eight" or "ancient" which breaks the "after C" part too

but yes you are right, the reason for english being weird is because its a mix between german, norse, anglosaxon, and french.it the reason why we have "beef" for the meat, but "cow" for the animal.
english also went trough a vowel shift, so words like "house" WERE pronouced houuse(similar to "hose") but because of the vowel shift, it turned to hause

english spelling also wasn't standardized until the printing press and dictionaries were popularized, that's why there is multiple spellings for the same word like "color" and "colour" same word, different spelling based on the dictionary spelling that was accepted at the time

here is a good video playlist that I like that is about lingusitics and usually focuses on english weird quirks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUnGvH8fUUc&list=PL96C35uN7xGLDEnHuhD7CTZES3KXFnwm0

heres another video about the great vowel shift
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6YUEzylvp0

and here's a video explaining a little more about WHY english is has weird spelling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqLiRu34kWo

I'm really fascinated by linguistics so your post are very interesting and give a lot of food for thought, food for thought, another english expression haha

anymany 2022-06-01 12:46:39

@Precipitation24 british english might be the type that you learn to write, but american english often has the biggest reach so that's probably the type you're likely to hear

if you think british english is hard to understand, look up "glaswegian" it's a accent of enlglish spoken in glasgow scottland, part of the UK

anymany 2022-06-02 19:34:03

@Precipitation24 that's an interesting comparison, i've never heard that