+1 for the interrobang

British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter ‘u’ through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who’s so smart after all?

Nah, seriously, the Normans added the ‘u’ to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn’t standardized, though. Johnson kept the ‘u’ out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don’t pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.

Cheery! Stop playing with your lipstick and go down to Cable Street. Igor’s potatoes have escaped again and Washpot can’t find Fred and Nobby.

Perhaps other people have said it but this is the quote I’m familiar with:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is 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.”

James Nicoll

Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).

Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).

There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo

That’s a good thing. Vowels are enormous in the range of ways they can be pronounced. Any vowel can become any other vowel before it’s done being pronounced, and then you can chain that effect. You can tell where people are from by their vowels. Vowels convey analog information whereas consonants convey digital. Vowels therefore have bandwidth to carry extra information. And so not only do we have lots of vowel pair sequences with their own rules for pronunciation, we have tons of rules for how surrounding consonants change those vowels. And then finally we have all sorts of cultural understandings about how altered vowels indicate mood and intent.

It’s good we don’t try to pretend there are only a handful of vowels.

You forgot naïve. Why does it have a fucking umlaut???

I’m just pointing out the consistency in spoken form. Your criticisms are valid from a technical perspective, the best kind of correct…

I mean, you do memorise them, you just don’t realise you’re doing it because you’re a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.

When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there’s generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you’re trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)

Oddly enough, “starbuck” has nothing to do with stars. It comes from some Old Norse meaning “sedge river”. This became the place name Starbeck, a town in northern England. People then took that as a surname, and the spelling changed to Starbuck at some point. Herman Melville then gives a character in Moby Dick the surname Starbuck, and eventually the founders of the coffee chain picked it for no particular reason other than that they liked the sound of it

So the “buck” part is, I guess, “river”. Or “brook”, to pick the more closely-related English term. This doesn’t change anything you said, of course, as nobody actually thinks of it like that, I just found the winding path it took kinda interesting

Which has its own myriad of issues

Reject language features, o kama toki pona

Esperanto isn’t the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.

And what’s the word in German that means everything you just wrote?

Truly unbelievable language. I love it. So easy to start, then you hit that wall of 25-letter words.

Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.

I’m doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese