this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Linguistics Humor

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don't seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written "chrome" as "krohm" or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with "ch". It's actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

and english is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from the worst, thai is afaik basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, to the point that people can read old texts quite easily.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Also Icelandic is so archaic compared to the other Nordic nations that they can more or less just read thousand year documents like how we may read writings from the 1700s.