3 ms·
The "it just looks wrong" makes me appreciate the effort of medieval scholars that added random silent consonants to English words to make their spelling closer
by mFixman 4y ago
The "it just looks wrong" makes me appreciate the effort of medieval scholars that added random silent consonants to English words to make their spelling closer to their Latin and Greek originals, like the 'b' in "doubt". It makes learning English a bit harder, but it also makes the language a big nicer.
Sometimes they got it wrong: "island" comes from Old English and never had an 's', but it sounds close enough to the Latin "isla" that they just tacked the letter in there.
- gumby 4y agoTo me it makes English easier because it makes spelling more semantic rather than phonetic, so that if you see an unfamiliar word you're more likely to figure out its meaning than if you simply had the sound.