On the evolution of English as a written or spoken language.

One problem with language is that English is, as anyone can sea, a very elusive tongue. When a gnu word or phrase comes along it is readily added two the body of language. English can be as light as heir or as heavy as led. It can be soft as flower sifted through your fingers. It often can be only understood when red in context and many associations can be maid as the language grows. Know one can really tell when something is knew or simply an adaptation of what others new already. It flows along like the see, wave upon wave two the end of Thyme. I wood wish that it was easier four the audience to understand but fore many it is like trying to see the trees threw the would or the flour in the meadow. When I wright I always try to make sure that the spelling is write, however bee four warned that I often make mistakes. Bear with me and try to judge what is fare. Life is a slim read and bends in the wind; hear today, goon tomorrow..

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Years ago a local radio station ran a segment call the "Correct Improper Spelling."ie:
pheier = fireAlso one English spelling combination is totally ridiculous, that is "ough."rough (ruf)
cough (cof)
bough (bow)
through (throo)
thought (thot)

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer:

Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.

Edited by Coyote, : Punctuation

there's a dr seuss book called "the tough coughs and he ploughs the dough". it only rhymes on paper.

Which leads us to a classic I Love Lucy episode. Pregnant Lucy wants them, especially including Ricky, to take English lessons so that the baby will learn proper English. So to convince him of the necessity, she has him read a children's book as a bedtime story. It is filled with -ough words and each one is pronounced differently than the previous one and Ricky tries to pronounce each new one as the previous one.Hans Conried is the English tutor:
Hans: There are two words I never want to hear. One is "swell", the other is "lousy."
Lucy: Swell. What's the lousy one?
And they reiterate that once or twice more.Hans recites the English vowel sounds and has each recite them back. It comes to Ricky:
Ricky (en puro espaol cubano): A, e, i, o, u.
Hans: Wherever did you learn that?
Ricky (otra vez en puro espaol cubano): Havana, Cuba. What's your excuse?Having formerly been Mexican by marriage, ... .

The big problem with English is that there are so many homonyms (the loose definition of having the same sound but different spellings). Many "grammar" lessons revolve around distinguishing between such words as "there", "their", and "they're", or "your" and "you're", etc, which have very different meanings and yet the same sound. That's not really grammar (relating to the structure of the language), but rather word choice.I don't know the history of reading education. All I know is that I hear about how phonetics had destroyed spelling, and yet I read in words, not in sounds. So a lot of posts I read by native English speakers I find to be very difficult to understand, because they constantly choose the wrong words. For example, on a programming forum, someone had a question about C code to implement a Barber poll. OK, I thought, must be a statistical polling method I hadn't heard of, so I asked for more info. Oh, it's that twirly thing hanging in front of a barber shop. Made me seriously want to reach through those wires to slap that fool up the side of the head!I'll have more tomorrow when I'm on a different system. Win7 refuses to support my Palm Pilot. Apparently some new definition of "progress" that I hadn't heard before.

Interestingly English is supposed to be a Germanic language tough it is not very close to other Germanic languages.For instance i can understand most Slavic languages if they speak really slow and use their hands Sure there are some differences that sometimes make you laugh like the Slovakian terms for blow(as in using your lungs to produce a wind current) is Fukati, in Slovenian Fukati means to have sex, and the Slovenian word pihati (blow) means to have sex in Slovakian. Tough their grammar and most of the other words sound very similar. It is real funny to watch the reaction of people say on the beach when few Slovakians try to inflate a beach ball, and one of them cries fukaj, fukaj, fukaj, and the whole beach looks at them going wtf. Or when a Slovenian cop stopped a Slovakian friend of mine and the cop said well you will have to step out of the car and blow (as in preform an alco test), you could see the fear in my friends eyesOn the same note if you compare other Germanic languages to English is not even closely as similar. Sure a few key words sound closely the same as mutter, mother, father, Vater. Tough the more you distance your self from the most used words the grater the difference is.

In 1066, England was invaded and conquered by the Norman French. Over the next few centuries the Germanic base, which had arrived with post-Roman Empire Germanic tribes, mixed with the French. So, we have a bastard language with a mixture of Germanic and Latin roots.So, your view that English is not very Germanic is partly true. Well done!

I've heard that English has a vocabulary that's roughly twice as large as those of other European languages, and that this is due to the fact that English has adopted very many words from other languages (notably Latin) and anglicized them. So for a great many concepts there exist at least two words in English: a word with an Anglo-Saxon root, and one with a Latin root. The anglicized Latin words are often the posher ones.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Does anyone know how to pronounce "ghoti" in English?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

If you mean how one used to pronounce gothi
the same way you now pronounce fish English orthography - Wikipedia Ghoti - Wikipedia

It was a bit like that. The Normans were the ruling class. That invasion (French example, like all "ion" ending words) is the reason (French) we have so many alternatives (French).Edited by bluegenes, : capitalized "french" for arachnophilia.

George Bernard Shaw:Ghoti

'Ghoti' is a funny one; a great and ironic example of how English orthography is not as willy-nilly as some would claim. No one lacking serious background on its history would ever pronounce it [fɪʃ].Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

It is not 'fish'.

quote:

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"It is not just that these correspondences never occur in the phonetic contexts in which he puts them. The correspondence /ʃ/= only occurs as palatalization in Latinate words and fish is clearly Basic."

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I would go for 'Goaty' or 'Gotty'.