Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough," 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation."
Yes, English is a retarded language. I work with a Korean, two Hondurans, two Japanese, and an Italian. On an almost daily basis, one of them will come to me with a question which I can answer from a purely grammatical standpoint, but truly has no logical explanation.
Take the last sentence of the previous paragraph- why does 'purely' have an 'e,' but 'truly' does not? Why is it that the root of explanation, 'explain,' has an 'i,' but 'explanation' does not? And for that matter, why isn't 'tion' spelled s-h-u-n? By the way, what's wrong with starting a sentence with 'and?'
I will admit to being a bit of a grammar and syntax snob, but I also have to admit that this language's kinda stupid in alot of ways.* Why would mobile phone texting include so many variants on "proper" English, if it weren't in need of some streamlining? Language is and should be of a fluid nature- Chaucer supposedly wrote in English, right? Noah Webster, the dictionary guy, decided, all by himself, after the American Revolution, that some words needed new spellings, because American English needed to be different from English English. Yes, one dude decided that 'colour' should be spelled 'color,' and 'theatre' should be 'theater.' Why? Just because.
So why shouldn't there be another Great Vowel Shift, or something like it? Call it the Gr8 Txt Shft. English is the second fastest growing language, and the most common lingua franca, so some changes are bound to happen, and hopefully, they will make English less harder to think in.
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