The more I learn other languages, the more annoyed I get at the Great Vowel Shift in English. We could’ve been aligned with so many other languages, but no, we just had to be different.

It’s wild, since English has such a vast vowel inventory that we can pronounce a lot of words in other languages, but since we read letters differently, many people end up with accents that don’t need to exist. Consider people pronouncing Spanish words with English vowels, even though all standard Spanish vowel sounds are already part of the standard English repertoire.