Words! How do they wrok?

[LeoP]

 

[Angilion]

There is no such thing as American English only bad spelling.

There is no such thing as English, only badly spelled French.

 

[Penfold101]

There is no such thing as English, only badly spelled French.

Hold my hieroglyphs.

 

[Angilion]

Hold my hieroglyphs.

That joke's gone over my head. What am I missing?

 

[Penfold101]

That joke's gone over my head. What am I missing?

You went from English back to being bad French, so I just went back even further. I’ve no idea if modern languages came from Egyptian, but it made me chuckle in my head…

 

[Angilion]

You went from English back to being bad French, so I just went back even further. I’ve no idea if modern languages came from Egyptian, but it made me chuckle in my head…

Ah, I see.

The reason why I missed the connection with Egyptian is that it has actually been claimed that modern English is essentially just badly spelled French. The claim is apparently intended seriously. I think it's a wild exaggeration of the connection between the two languages, but appropriate in reply to a similar claim regarding American English and English English, i.e. that one isn't just a badly spelled version of the other.

 

[Bluecube]

There’s no such thing as English English just English!

 

[Angilion]

There’s no such thing as English English just English!

There are a bunch of dialects of English, so it makes some sense to specify which dialect of English in the context of different dialects of English.

 

[Angilion]

I saw this one just yesterday;

https://twitter.com/x/status/1816104663088832578

The classic bit of poking fun at English spelling and pronunciation is 'fish' being spelled 'ghoti'.

'gh' has the same sound as 'f' in many English words.
'o' has the same sound as 'i' in at least one English word (women).
'ti' has the same sound as 'sh' in many English words.

There's usually a known reason for the strangeness of English spelling and pronunciation. Usually centuries ago.

One big factor was the change in pronunciation of vowels:

Great Vowel Shift - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So in many cases we ended up with the spelling from before the change and the pronunciation from after it. And, as usual in English, the changing wasn't consistent.

Busses. One s just does not give enough ssssss. No way is 'buses' correct.

That one gets me too. 'buses' would obviously be pronounced like 'fuses' or 'muses'.