Comment on Learning a new language is easy!

• Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  English isn’t exactly innocent there. See knight, plumber, mnemonic, pterodactyl.

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  • weker01@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Well those are words descendent from Latin and Greek.

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    • Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah but the spelling ‘normally’ would have been updated to match English pronunciation. That’s what happens in most languages. As I understand there were two issues:

      • Some dictionary writers (ca. late 1400s IIRC) wanted spellings that seemed fancier like French and Latin, which is why e.g. the silent B in plumber was added ‘artificially’.
      • The printing press was invented right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift so old spellings got “locked in” even though spoken English continued to change significantly for a long time afterward.

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