• givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    It’s because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.

    The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England’s first one didn’t know how it worked and neither did any English speaker

    So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.

    And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.

    Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn’t speak English made choices to change it

    No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.

    But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.

    Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.

    Anyways, that’s why English doesn’t make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      12 days ago

      It certainly doesn’t help that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

    • Nikls94@lemmy.world
      0·
      12 days ago

      A French. The language where you have 5 wovels, use 3 for the word goose and the other 2 to pronounce it.

          • alsimoneau@lemmy.ca
            0·
            10 days ago

            It’s really not. Maybe if you pronounce an English ‘u’, but not a French one. Source: I’m French Canadian.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            11 days ago

            If you look at an IPA chart, you can see how going from /i/ to /e/ to /a/ is a process of the vowel becoming more and more “open” over time (said with the mouth wider and wider).

            In Quebec, the vowel shift that caused “oi” to have a /wa/ sound didn’t fully happen. So, the word “moi” is often pronounced more like /mwe/ or /mwɛ/. But “oiseau” (bird) is still pronounced with a /wa/.

            The modern French pronunciation of the Loire river /lwaʁ/ influences the English pronunciation /lwɑːr/. But, other languages use a spelling that matches the French but have a different pronunciation. In Italian and Spanish it’s Loira. The Latin name was Liger. So, it used to have a /i/ pronunciation before the vowel shift.

            tl;dr: modern French pronunciation vs spelling is just about as bad as English.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Yep…

        There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That’s why pronunciation doesn’t line up with spelling.