A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin). One example: why do we call t

A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin). One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics