What a Tangled Web…
Did you ever notice how screwed up the English language really is? At first it seems so straightforward, but the endless list of exceptions makes it one of the most (if not THE most) complicated language in the world to learn.
Let’s start simply with the letter “A”. In school children are taught about both the long and short sounds of the vowel, but never the seemingly unending alternatives to its pronunciation. Consider the following common words and the pronunciation of the letter “A” within them: bad, father, any, maple, village, was, water, bigamy, and parent. Confused yet? Well, if it is used together with another letter, that should help simplify the rules, right? Wrong! What about the ways “AL” is used in combination, such as in pal, salmon, talk, or swallow?
Everyone knows about the silent “B” in the words lamb, limb, climb, bomb, tomb, womb, thumb, debt and subtle — to name just a few. But why is the word that describes something that is more numb spelled exactly the same way as the word that describes a numeral?
You think “C” is simple? If you watch Sesame Street, you are fed at an early age that “C” is for cookie, but they leave out timeless classics such as city, cioppino, cello, and the multiple personality of accept.
“D” isn’t safe, either as bad, guessed, and handsome clearly demonstrate.
I could go through the entire alphabet, since every letter has its own ambiguities and peculiarities, but I’ll leave you with “E” — bed, suede, camel, sergeant, height, be, pretty, encore, sew, were, and learned. Or was that the accented adjective learnèd? I give up!
Frankly, I blame Noah Webster for creating his dictionary at a time when English was in a state of flux, influenced by the real melting pot that was northern Europe two centuries ago, cementing instable spellings and varied pronunciations into the aggregate cesspool that is the English language today.
I imagine the double-, triple- and more duty is from the language being spoken before it was written down. Only recently, relatively speaking, has spelling been standardized (note the many ways Shaxspear spelled his name) or literacy been the norm. I can make up a new word easily when speaking, then I need to cram it into a spelling using only 26 letters. You gotta allow for some creative uses of pronunciation.
Hawaiian, for example. I actually have no idea what written Hawai’ian looks like (Does it even have a written form? Surely it must. Mustn’t it?). Anyway, somebody once determined that Hawai’ian, when written in the Greco-Roman alphabet we use, makes use of only 12 letters. As unfamiliar as I am with the language, I’ve got to imagine that it makes use of more than 12 sounds when spoken. (h,k,l,m,n,p,w and the vowels, if you were wondering.)