He says English has more words than any other language?? I love Fry & his body of work. And that kind of commonly-held assumption (held by speakers of many languages) is one reason why bridge languages like Esperanto were formed.
Not requiring honorifics or politeness levels, and being only minorly gendered (more cultrual use of specific words, and use of some gender oriented words as epithets) unlike other languages. Malcom Gladwell wrote (I think in his book 'outliers') that english became the standard language for pilots and copilots, because it allowed copilots to mention problems as if they are serious, without being impolite. It basically put the 'lower ranked' individual on even footing for discussing problems.
@@tomblack4634 Make I ask for the source of that information? That'll be cool if he is! --- Ĉu mi rajtas demandi la spurcon de tiu informacio? Estus glora se li estus!
@@tomblack4634tio ne estis la demando. Ankaŭ mi neniam aŭdis de iu ajn fonto ke Stephen vere lernis kaj parolkapablas Esperanton, des malpli aŭdis lin mem iam ajn uzi ĝin.
There's a ted talk about how people who's language doesn't have a future tense. How they are better at saving money. Likewise people who don't have a subjunctive tense would be less regretful or speculative...
Mi ŝategas vin, Stephen! Legis kelkajn de viaj libroj (jam antaŭlonge). Eĉ pensis pri tio ŝteli kelkajn romankomencajn frazojn de vi por uzi ilin por mikronovelo mia 🧑🔧✍️ sed sukcesis absteni. Domaĝas ke vi ankoraŭ ne parolas Esperanton. Aŭ ĉu vi vere studis ĝin? 🧚
Well, it would be hard not to, especially for someone as intelligent as him! I learnt Esperanto in two weeks. They say that it's six times easier to learn than most other (European) languages.
А если присоединиться , то жаба задушит, что бесплатно что-то сделал? Ech guto malgranda konstante frapante traboras la monton granitan. Даже маленькая капелька постоянно стуча пробивает гранитную гору. См мульт про Мази на канале ni1954, учебный мульт на Эсперанто.
Pli ol dek nobelpremiitoj parolis Esperanton. Tolstoj lernis ĝin. Einstein ne lernis, sed estis oficiala protektanto de la Germana Esperantokongreso en Kaselo en la 1950-aj jaroj kaj skribis afablan leteron pri ĝi.
Yes, he's good at making statements without actually knowing whether something is true. Without actually investigating the facts. He reads something that has become a myth and repeats it and people believe it. e.g. the enormous vocabulary of English versus other languages. I suspect that he's just repeating that without really knowing. I suspect that Chinese has a vocabulary as large as English. And his statement about the language isolates in Papua New Guinea as if he's an expert on it. He's read it somewhere but gives no indication that it's not something that he knows as a fact. He should throw in some 'apparently's if he hasn't studied a subject himself. Also in his program about language he made some hugely erroneous statements about the Chinese writing system.
Robert Budzul I like Stephen in small bursts. When I see him on another documentary, or another TV show where he is giving his opinions, it gets tiring. Then you get the sense that he has to be seen everywhere all the time, and that's sad.
Robert Budzul He's not actually wrong about English vocabulary. However, the reason isn't so much that English itself can express more, or that English speakers have a wider vocabulary, but that English has a tendency to borrow freely from other languages, which leads to it having a large number of synonyms. Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, does not, and has a tendency to rely instead on calques and compounds rather than borrowing from other language.
+Cíat Ó Gáibhtheacháin Hmm, so English has more words than for example French or Italian or German? Where is that proof of that? I speak all these and I don't see for example that English is more sophisticated than for example German. On the contrary, English uses many words that are actually made up and not real unique words, like up and make, to combine them to form make up, or get off, get away, get up, get down, which in my opinion is a poor way of language use, many other languages that I know have distinct unique words for these meanings. Also, other languages are exactly as complex as the societies have developed that used them. In this term, you can argue that French is much more developed than English, as the French have done a much larger portion of contribution to culture and art and many words in English are borrowed from French for example and cannot be considered original English. Other languages do that too of course, German borrows generously from French and English. So I would not trust the judgement of a person that only speaks one language in depth and as a bi lingual person, I don't think it is clear that one language has more words or is more expressive than another. If there would be one, Esperanto would be it: Esperanto has words that you can express things that in one word that you will need 3 words or more in another language, which is for me always a sign of poor vocabulary. Esperanto for example, is "the one that hopes", that is 4 words. Lerno is to learn, lernanto means "the one that learns", so you could still say "learner", but if you use the future tense, lernonto, you would have to translate this as "the one that will learn in the future" and esperonto would be "the one that will hope". This illustrates the point about Esperanto to be even made more compolete than most languages are, at least elegant, where you can use one word to express meaning, instead of having to cobble together 5 of them to convey meaning, which is very inefficient and slow.
+nigratruo This isn't a controversial thing. It's based off of the number of words recognised by lexicographers in each language. English weighs in at over 1,000,000 (www.npr.org/2010/12/16/132106374/google-book-tool-tracks-cultural-change-with-words). Den Duden recognises about 150,000, and L'Académie Française (along with Larousse) recognises about 100,000 so words in French. Now, I can only guess that you didn't actually read what I wrote, because I didn't even imply that English the fact that English as a bigger vocabulary than other languages makes it somehow more 'sophisticated' or in any way better. Go back and read it. You're attacking a strawman. The examples you gave of the likes of 'make up' and 'get off' demonstrate a common pattern across the Germanic languages. In German, these would be separable verbs like 'anziehen', 'aufstehen' or 'fortgehen'. In German, unlike English, these would be treated as single distinct words, whereas in English separable verbs have become what's known as 'phrasal verbs', and thus 'make up' and 'get off' both be treated as consisting of the words 'get', 'make', 'up', and 'off', and not as distinct words in and of themselves. If you think the fact that English does this is bad, then you're basically making the same statement about all the other Germanic languages. All of them. Would it be better if rather than the like of 'to make up' and 'to get off', English used the likes of 'to upmake' and 'to offget' like German does? I don't see any benefit either way. > many other languages that I know have distinct unique words for these meanings. Yes, many do. I didn't argue otherwise. English also has many unique words for things that other languages use phrases for such as, in French, 'donner un coup de pied à' for 'kick' (though you could also use 'botter' in French, the former is more common in my experience) or 'se souvenir de' for 'remember'. Now, would you say that English speakers have a better, more sophisticated grasp of remembering and kicking because they have single words for the concepts rather than having to resort to phrases? Of course not. And I never made that argument. You're attacking a strawman. > In this term, you can argue that French is much more developed than English, as the French have done a much larger portion of contribution to culture and art How do you figure that? Having distinct words for things doesn't make your society or language any more developed or sophisticated than any other one. French simply doesn't like borrowing vocabulary from other languages, whereas English has no such aversion. Your statement is a non sequitur. > and many words in English are borrowed from French for example and cannot be considered original English. Exactly what defines a word as 'native'? The length of time it's been in use? If a word has been in use in a language for 1000 years, would be be considered native? 2000? What's that barrier? Because if it's 2000 years, then French is essentially badly mangled Latin with a big chunk for Frankish vocabulary thrown in. > German borrows generously from French and English. Sure, but to nowhere near the degree that English has historically borrowed from other languages, and that's a relatively recent phenomenon. The notion of 'language purity' in English as been weak ever since the Norman Conquest. > So I would not trust the judgement of a person that only speaks one language in depth and as a bi lingual person. I wouldn't trust a bilingual person in these matters if they didn't have at least some modicum of training in the actual science of linguistics. I would trust a monolingual linguist in these matters more than a polyglot who's ignorant of linguistics. Also, who is this monolingual person you're speaking of? > I don't think it is clear that one language has more words or is more expressive than another. You keep on bringing up this notion of 'expressivity', which I for one, never mentioned. Having a larger vocabulary can lend nuance through choice of vocabulary, but it doesn't necessarily add expressivity. This is because synonyms can belong to different registers of speech: for instance, 'enter' is in a higher register of speech than 'go in', but they both mean the same thing. Moreover, you're not a lexicographer, so you don't really have anything to go on other than gut instincts. > Esperanto has words that you can express things that in one word that you will need 3 words or more in another language, which is for me always a sign of poor vocabulary. Why is this a sign of 'poor vocabulary'? Is there something inherently better about the German seperable verb 'nachfragen' in comparison with its direct English phrasal verb equivalent 'ask after'? > This illustrates the point about Esperanto to be even made more compolete than most languages are, at least elegant, where you can use one word to express meaning, instead of having to cobble together 5 of them to convey meaning, which is very inefficient and slow. No, it doesn't. It just demonstrates that Esperanto has a lot of productive derivational morphology. Zamenhof didn't come up with all that stuff to be 'expressive' or 'efficient', but because he wanted to keep the core vocabulary of the language small to aid in learnability. You really should go and study linguistics for a while, because you have some *very* peculiar ideas about language. Your little rant was quite incoherent, and you even contradicted yourself. Oh, and from the a linguist's point of view, there's very little difference between something like 'esper-o-nt-o' and using separate words to mark those concepts: you're just replacing words with bound morphemes. Here's your comment with all the borrowed vocabulary highlighted, if you're interested: notehub.org/ir0t7
English is sort of like Esperanto, sort of, in that it has borrowed from Greek, Latin and French plus various others. I think the only thing that needs to be done is to simplify spellings, and get rid of lot of unnecessary letters. Thngs kn b splt wa mor smpli.
I always thought of it that way too. The same general idea of creating a mix of different European languages, a mix between Germanic languages and Romance languages, is the same between English and Esperanto. Obviously Esperanto is far far more organized and so easy to learn. I think what helps people learn English is similar to what helps people learn Esperanto via diverse "familiarities" built throughout the languages. There's a kind of English called Basic English or International English which does exactly what you say in that it supposedly streamlines the language in certain ways, mostly by limiting the amount of vocabulary so that there aren't dozens of ways to say the same thing; unfortunately that fluidity of grammar and vocab is what makes English one of the most expressive spoken/written languages in the world which I think is the best part.
+Evildea English speakers be stubborn af. Remove silent letters that do nothing for a word and make us have to remember nonsense and really just waste our time? NONSENSE! Tho, thru, cof, tuf, plow/bow, thaut (not thot, cuz that caught and cot nonsense) are obviously infinitely easier and more logical than though, through, cough, tough, plough/bough, and thought, for the very reason that DIFFERENT sounds are spelled DIFFERENTLY (a concept which seems to baffle English speakers, for whatever reason, even though it makes things much more straightforward, makes learning to spell infinitely easier, and so many other languages understand this principle and have gone to great lengths, in the form of spelling reforms, to achieve it) and thus we know exactly how to pronounce those words. What if you had never heard of those words and you were asked to pronounce them? I guarantee you -- I bet you my life, the life of my family, the fucking world -- that they would be compelled to pronounce them the same because they're spelled the same. But it's like lelnop. But why tho? Cuz reasons. That's all it is. It's just cuz reasons. You couldn't give me a good reason to spell them all the same. "But that etymology tho." No, etymology is not an argument. No average Joe on the street cares about where the word comes from, he just wants to spell it and move on with his life; we have more pressing concerns than whether or not to include a letter in a word because the people who used the word a hundred years ago used it. But if those words were spelled differently, as they are pronounced? "Oh, well that's obviously 'tho', and that's obviously 'thru', and that's OBVIOUSLY 'cof'," and so on and so on, because LOGIC.
Michael Roach The job of making English spelling more logical is made very difficult by the fact that English has around 40 phonemes, more or less depending on the dialect, while the alphabet we use has only 26 letters, several of which are redundant. Simply respelling a word can be very difficult because there is no way to do it (short of adding new letters) without making up some sort of combination of active and silent letters. For instance, how do we differentiate between “light” and “lit” while simplifying “light”? Of course, we perpetuate that stupid silent E: lite
I'm a linguist and conlanger myself, and a massive stephen fry fan so this just made me fangirl and fangirl and fangirl
Stephen is an inexhaustible supply of words and ideas, and somehow never gets boring.
steen fry mentioned my city. everything is beautiful, nothing hurts.
Hey Stephen Fry heres something to contribute to the Esperanto cause,do a movie!
He says English has more words than any other language?? I love Fry & his body of work. And that kind of commonly-held assumption (held by speakers of many languages) is one reason why bridge languages like Esperanto were formed.
Only the first 5s are actually about Esperanto, the rest is about language as a whole.
Not requiring honorifics or politeness levels, and being only minorly gendered (more cultrual use of specific words, and use of some gender oriented words as epithets) unlike other languages.
Malcom Gladwell wrote (I think in his book 'outliers') that english became the standard language for pilots and copilots, because it allowed copilots to mention problems as if they are serious, without being impolite. It basically put the 'lower ranked' individual on even footing for discussing problems.
He didn't get far then...never heard a peep about it from him since.
He’s fluent
@@tomblack4634 Make I ask for the source of that information? That'll be cool if he is!
---
Ĉu mi rajtas demandi la spurcon de tiu informacio? Estus glora se li estus!
I know Esperanto.
@@tomblack4634tio ne estis la demando. Ankaŭ mi neniam aŭdis de iu ajn fonto ke Stephen vere lernis kaj parolkapablas Esperanton, des malpli aŭdis lin mem iam ajn uzi ĝin.
esperanto ege faciligis la lernadon de francan por mi, ghi estas bona ilo
SF: "... Esperanto is an amusing attempt to make Spanish sound elegant..." from Paperweight (Trefusis is Unwell), 1992.
ĉiuj devus provi lerni novan lingvon, miaopinie
There's a ted talk about how people who's language doesn't have a future tense. How they are better at saving money.
Likewise people who don't have a subjunctive tense would be less regretful or speculative...
He mentioned Wittgenstein!
Brazil.
INTERLOCUTOR OH MAN THAT'S A WORD. THAT THERE, THAT'S A WORD. MMMMMMM. delicious.
Mi ŝategas vin, Stephen! Legis kelkajn de viaj libroj (jam antaŭlonge). Eĉ pensis pri tio ŝteli kelkajn romankomencajn frazojn de vi por uzi ilin por mikronovelo mia 🧑🔧✍️ sed sukcesis absteni. Domaĝas ke vi ankoraŭ ne parolas Esperanton. Aŭ ĉu vi vere studis ĝin? 🧚
2:30 how many situations are there like this? sounds rare
Присединяйтесь к "Всемирной декларации за эсперанто". Гугл найдёт
this video is old. does anyone know if he actually succeeded in learning esperanto?
Good question! I would love to know.
Espereble, li sukcesis! ^_^
Well, it would be hard not to, especially for someone as intelligent as him! I learnt Esperanto in two weeks. They say that it's six times easier to learn than most other (European) languages.
@@AsatorIV you dont "learn" a language in 2 weeks .
@@theali8oras274 And why would that be exactly?
@@AsatorIV because knowing how to play 2 chords does nt mean you "learned" guitar
Mi pensis, ke li parolus Esperanton en ĉi tiu video. :(
Guru Laghima sama! Mi estis seniluziigitis...
learning speed at MAX CAPACITY
These subtitles are a hack job.
А если присоединиться , то жаба задушит, что бесплатно что-то сделал?
Ech guto malgranda konstante frapante traboras la monton granitan.
Даже маленькая капелька постоянно стуча пробивает гранитную гору.
См мульт про Мази на канале ni1954, учебный мульт на Эсперанто.
Eĉ guto malgranda... jes, sed oftege intervenas antaŭfine vulkano kaj detruas ĉion :-)
Mi volas audi Stephen Fry parolas en Esperanto! Kiu sciis li estis lerni Esperanto??? Kiom famaj homoj scias Esperanton?
Pli ol dek nobelpremiitoj parolis Esperanton. Tolstoj lernis ĝin. Einstein ne lernis, sed estis oficiala protektanto de la Germana Esperantokongreso en Kaselo en la 1950-aj jaroj kaj skribis afablan leteron pri ĝi.
He said "langue maternelle", not "lingua materna". :p
secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Esperanto_langue_officielle_de_lUE
peticio por esperanto en EU
I'm sceptical, that idea is not going to happen, or maybe, 100 years from now
Dayum niggah he used Orwellia right. 3:40
Yes, he's good at making statements without actually knowing whether something is true. Without actually investigating the facts. He reads something that has become a myth and repeats it and people believe it. e.g. the enormous vocabulary of English versus other languages. I suspect that he's just repeating that without really knowing. I suspect that Chinese has a vocabulary as large as English. And his statement about the language isolates in Papua New Guinea as if he's an expert on it. He's read it somewhere but gives no indication that it's not something that he knows as a fact. He should throw in some 'apparently's if he hasn't studied a subject himself. Also in his program about language he made some hugely erroneous statements about the Chinese writing system.
Robert Budzul yes
Robert Budzul I like Stephen in small bursts. When I see him on another documentary, or another TV show where he is giving his opinions, it gets tiring. Then you get the sense that he has to be seen everywhere all the time, and that's sad.
Robert Budzul He's not actually wrong about English vocabulary. However, the reason isn't so much that English itself can express more, or that English speakers have a wider vocabulary, but that English has a tendency to borrow freely from other languages, which leads to it having a large number of synonyms. Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, does not, and has a tendency to rely instead on calques and compounds rather than borrowing from other language.
+Cíat Ó Gáibhtheacháin Hmm, so English has more words than for example French or Italian or German? Where is that proof of that? I speak all these and I don't see for example that English is more sophisticated than for example German. On the contrary, English uses many words that are actually made up and not real unique words, like up and make, to combine them to form make up, or get off, get away, get up, get down, which in my opinion is a poor way of language use, many other languages that I know have distinct unique words for these meanings. Also, other languages are exactly as complex as the societies have developed that used them. In this term, you can argue that French is much more developed than English, as the French have done a much larger portion of contribution to culture and art and many words in English are borrowed from French for example and cannot be considered original English. Other languages do that too of course, German borrows generously from French and English. So I would not trust the judgement of a person that only speaks one language in depth and as a bi lingual person, I don't think it is clear that one language has more words or is more expressive than another. If there would be one, Esperanto would be it: Esperanto has words that you can express things that in one word that you will need 3 words or more in another language, which is for me always a sign of poor vocabulary. Esperanto for example, is "the one that hopes", that is 4 words. Lerno is to learn, lernanto means "the one that learns", so you could still say "learner", but if you use the future tense, lernonto, you would have to translate this as "the one that will learn in the future" and esperonto would be "the one that will hope". This illustrates the point about Esperanto to be even made more compolete than most languages are, at least elegant, where you can use one word to express meaning, instead of having to cobble together 5 of them to convey meaning, which is very inefficient and slow.
+nigratruo This isn't a controversial thing. It's based off of the number of words recognised by lexicographers in each language. English weighs in at over 1,000,000 (www.npr.org/2010/12/16/132106374/google-book-tool-tracks-cultural-change-with-words). Den Duden recognises about 150,000, and L'Académie Française (along with Larousse) recognises about 100,000 so words in French.
Now, I can only guess that you didn't actually read what I wrote, because I didn't even imply that English the fact that English as a bigger vocabulary than other languages makes it somehow more 'sophisticated' or in any way better. Go back and read it. You're attacking a strawman.
The examples you gave of the likes of 'make up' and 'get off' demonstrate a common pattern across the Germanic languages. In German, these would be separable verbs like 'anziehen', 'aufstehen' or 'fortgehen'. In German, unlike English, these would be treated as single distinct words, whereas in English separable verbs have become what's known as 'phrasal verbs', and thus 'make up' and 'get off' both be treated as consisting of the words 'get', 'make', 'up', and 'off', and not as distinct words in and of themselves. If you think the fact that English does this is bad, then you're basically making the same statement about all the other Germanic languages. All of them. Would it be better if rather than the like of 'to make up' and 'to get off', English used the likes of 'to upmake' and 'to offget' like German does? I don't see any benefit either way.
> many other languages that I know have distinct unique words for these meanings.
Yes, many do. I didn't argue otherwise. English also has many unique words for things that other languages use phrases for such as, in French, 'donner un coup de pied à' for 'kick' (though you could also use 'botter' in French, the former is more common in my experience) or 'se souvenir de' for 'remember'.
Now, would you say that English speakers have a better, more sophisticated grasp of remembering and kicking because they have single words for the concepts rather than having to resort to phrases? Of course not. And I never made that argument. You're attacking a strawman.
> In this term, you can argue that French is much more developed than English, as the French have done a much larger portion of contribution to culture and art
How do you figure that? Having distinct words for things doesn't make your society or language any more developed or sophisticated than any other one. French simply doesn't like borrowing vocabulary from other languages, whereas English has no such aversion. Your statement is a non sequitur.
> and many words in English are borrowed from French for example and cannot be considered original English.
Exactly what defines a word as 'native'? The length of time it's been in use? If a word has been in use in a language for 1000 years, would be be considered native? 2000? What's that barrier? Because if it's 2000 years, then French is essentially badly mangled Latin with a big chunk for Frankish vocabulary thrown in.
> German borrows generously from French and English.
Sure, but to nowhere near the degree that English has historically borrowed from other languages, and that's a relatively recent phenomenon. The notion of 'language purity' in English as been weak ever since the Norman Conquest.
> So I would not trust the judgement of a person that only speaks one language in depth and as a bi lingual person.
I wouldn't trust a bilingual person in these matters if they didn't have at least some modicum of training in the actual science of linguistics. I would trust a monolingual linguist in these matters more than a polyglot who's ignorant of linguistics.
Also, who is this monolingual person you're speaking of?
> I don't think it is clear that one language has more words or is more expressive than another.
You keep on bringing up this notion of 'expressivity', which I for one, never mentioned. Having a larger vocabulary can lend nuance through choice of vocabulary, but it doesn't necessarily add expressivity. This is because synonyms can belong to different registers of speech: for instance, 'enter' is in a higher register of speech than 'go in', but they both mean the same thing.
Moreover, you're not a lexicographer, so you don't really have anything to go on other than gut instincts.
> Esperanto has words that you can express things that in one word that you will need 3 words or more in another language, which is for me always a sign of poor vocabulary.
Why is this a sign of 'poor vocabulary'? Is there something inherently better about the German seperable verb 'nachfragen' in comparison with its direct English phrasal verb equivalent 'ask after'?
> This illustrates the point about Esperanto to be even made more compolete than most languages are, at least elegant, where you can use one word to express meaning, instead of having to cobble together 5 of them to convey meaning, which is very inefficient and slow.
No, it doesn't. It just demonstrates that Esperanto has a lot of productive derivational morphology. Zamenhof didn't come up with all that stuff to be 'expressive' or 'efficient', but because he wanted to keep the core vocabulary of the language small to aid in learnability.
You really should go and study linguistics for a while, because you have some *very* peculiar ideas about language. Your little rant was quite incoherent, and you even contradicted yourself. Oh, and from the a linguist's point of view, there's very little difference between something like 'esper-o-nt-o' and using separate words to mark those concepts: you're just replacing words with bound morphemes.
Here's your comment with all the borrowed vocabulary highlighted, if you're interested: notehub.org/ir0t7
Someone forgot to take their medication today.
You?
Someone slapped his nose to one side.
I really agree that political correctness is important.
English is sort of like Esperanto, sort of, in that it has borrowed from Greek, Latin and French plus various others.
I think the only thing that needs to be done is to simplify spellings, and get rid of lot of unnecessary letters.
Thngs kn b splt wa mor smpli.
I always thought of it that way too. The same general idea of creating a mix of different European languages, a mix between Germanic languages and Romance languages, is the same between English and Esperanto. Obviously Esperanto is far far more organized and so easy to learn. I think what helps people learn English is similar to what helps people learn Esperanto via diverse "familiarities" built throughout the languages. There's a kind of English called Basic English or International English which does exactly what you say in that it supposedly streamlines the language in certain ways, mostly by limiting the amount of vocabulary so that there aren't dozens of ways to say the same thing; unfortunately that fluidity of grammar and vocab is what makes English one of the most expressive spoken/written languages in the world which I think is the best part.
moonman_v It would be easier to convince the world to learn Esperanto than to convince the world to simplify English :P
+Evildea English speakers be stubborn af. Remove silent letters that do nothing for a word and make us have to remember nonsense and really just waste our time? NONSENSE! Tho, thru, cof, tuf, plow/bow, thaut (not thot, cuz that caught and cot nonsense) are obviously infinitely easier and more logical than though, through, cough, tough, plough/bough, and thought, for the very reason that DIFFERENT sounds are spelled DIFFERENTLY (a concept which seems to baffle English speakers, for whatever reason, even though it makes things much more straightforward, makes learning to spell infinitely easier, and so many other languages understand this principle and have gone to great lengths, in the form of spelling reforms, to achieve it) and thus we know exactly how to pronounce those words. What if you had never heard of those words and you were asked to pronounce them? I guarantee you -- I bet you my life, the life of my family, the fucking world -- that they would be compelled to pronounce them the same because they're spelled the same. But it's like lelnop. But why tho? Cuz reasons. That's all it is. It's just cuz reasons. You couldn't give me a good reason to spell them all the same. "But that etymology tho." No, etymology is not an argument. No average Joe on the street cares about where the word comes from, he just wants to spell it and move on with his life; we have more pressing concerns than whether or not to include a letter in a word because the people who used the word a hundred years ago used it. But if those words were spelled differently, as they are pronounced? "Oh, well that's obviously 'tho', and that's obviously 'thru', and that's OBVIOUSLY 'cof'," and so on and so on, because LOGIC.
Esperangla, anyone?? No???
Michael Roach The job of making English spelling more logical is made very difficult by the fact that English has around 40 phonemes, more or less depending on the dialect, while the alphabet we use has only 26 letters, several of which are redundant. Simply respelling a word can be very difficult because there is no way to do it (short of adding new letters) without making up some sort of combination of active and silent letters. For instance, how do we differentiate between “light” and “lit” while simplifying “light”? Of course, we perpetuate that stupid silent E: lite
Stephen Fry. You must have gone through so much pain to take your own life.
RIP 10/11/2016
goodlifewizard just for that😜
Fuck off
I almost died whY WOULD YOU DO THAt.