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Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues), English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (
by aaroninsf 5y ago
Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues),
English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized.
With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance.
As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't.
Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.)
Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.
- aaroninsf 5y agoAnother footnote: English vocabulary and etymology also encode history beyond provenance. The words in English for meat and its sources are the go-to example. The words for the animals, are from Anglo-Saxon. The words for the meat as you eat it, are from French. Because England acquired its French from occupation c. 1066; the peasants knew the animals but it was the new French-speaking aristocracy were the ones that ate them.