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Native English speaker here, lose/loose are tough ones.

Looking at both words I could see how either one could be pronounced either way.

Thanks French (I suspect)!

It’s useful to keep in mind that written words are merely an attempt to record sounds, and when these spellings occurred these words were very likely pronounced much differently than today.

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TabbsTheBat@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Neither word is of french origin, im pretty sure :3

Anywho, yeah I know a large part of why english spelling is the way that it is is because of things like the great vowel shift, which came after the spelling standardizations, as well as the mix of germanic, latin, and french (norman) influences all coming with their own spelling rules (as well as one off words borrowing spellings from other languages like spanish), but as someone coming from a language with pretty consistent spelling where loan words are adapted phonetically, the whole mess of having to know the origin of the word to even begin to vaguely grasp at the spelling was an adjustment lol.

I mean, the weirdest spelling related quirk in my native language is that we have letters referred to as “nasal letters” which are not in any way pronounced nasally hah :3 compared to english, it’s a walk in the park

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- orclev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Yes English is a complete train wreck of a language for multiple reasons, not just in terms of spelling and grammar, but every single aspect of the language. I do appreciate that it’s mostly non-gendered, but that’s just about the only win it has. English should have done what a few other languages did back around the 1800s and completely revamped how every single word is spelled to make it all uniform (and achieve a truly phonetic alphabet), but it’s kind of too late for that now.
  
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  - TabbsTheBat@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    As a non-binary person I do appreciate the ability to have non-gendered words in english :3 my native language has everything as male or female which is… Ugh
    
    Also funny thing about the spelling reform - we had one here in like… the 19th century, though it was not because our spelling had gotten vastly inconsistent or anything, the main thing that was changed was that a lot of sounds written with polish inspired digraphs (sz, cz etc.) were replaced by czech inspired š, č, ž etc… and also the letter ł which was also a polish influence was removed… which is fair, we didn’t really have a use for it. We also still have the digraph ch :3
    
    Either way, we used to often have things like old 18th or 17th century papers in our textbooks to read, and they were still perfectly readable with the old spelling if you knew those few changes, so it wasn’t a major change, though I do think it was a good one
    
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