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> There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word

by ColanR 6y ago

> There has to be a rule for rules to broken. English orthography is practically irregular (although it's vaguely, chaotically regular if you subject each word to an analysis based on most probable language origin.) I mean, yeah. The rules governing English are a combination of the rules governing a couple other languages. Divide up the vocabulary according to the applicable rules, and I'm pretty sure you end up with a fragment each of the French, Saxon, Norse, etc. languages, and within those fragments the rules make as much sense as they do in the full versions of the respective languages. E.g.: put "rendezvous" & "accomplice" in one pile, "loan" in another, and the rules of each pile would be internally consistent, and consistent with the rules of French and Norse respectively...accounting for language drift, of course. A large fraction of English follows French rules - might as well ask the French language to fix their spellings to make phonetic sense. The work put into that would translate directly to fix a lot of English. > Also, it's far worse than this. The Normans changed the spelling of English words that were unpronounceable to them by adding a bunch of letters. One I remember is that the reason the "-shire" suffix is confusing is because before the Normans it was just "-scr". Personally, given the entymology of English, it makes a lot of sense to preserve the original, applicable, rules of the languages English is comprised of. Otherwise, it would be like rewriting either Norse or French to fit the other - as you mention, that's even worse than the combination of languages in the first place. Edit for clarity.

tsimionescu 6y ago
Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough. For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' -> Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem'). So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words into a language and completely disregard the orthography of the original language. I don't think you lose much by doing that, in fact.
- ColanR 6y ago
  That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant to determine how words were re-written, and neither vocabulary would be counted as loan words. I think English would claim both as the original languages. I, think, english, would, both = old english claim, original, language = old french

by ColanR 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

Many more phonetic writing systems re-write loanwords to match local pronunciation, at least once the words are established enough. For example, in Romanian, recent borrows do typically preserve the original spelling (e.g. English 'computer','mall' -> Romanian 'computer', 'mall'; plausible Romanian phonetic spelling 'compiutăr','mol'). But older loan-words that have become established take on a phonetic spelling (e.g. French 'bureau' -> Romanian 'birou'; English 'interview', 'tramway', 'jam' -> Romanian 'interviu', 'tramvai', 'gem'). So it is possible to absorb large amounts of loan-words into a language and completely disregard the orthography of the original language. I don't think you lose much by doing that, in fact.

ColanR 6y ago
That's true. I guess what I didn't really say explicitly is that I don't think there is a 'local pronunciation' in the case of English. French and Saxon seem to have merged on equal terms, where neither was sufficiently dominant to determine how words were re-written, and neither vocabulary would be counted as loan words. I think English would claim both as the original languages. I, think, english, would, both = old english claim, original, language = old french