The state of it
How did English end up such a weird soup of spellings and pronunciations, alongside its giant vocabulary and regular grammatical skirmishes?
First, we must lay blame with the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Norman French, who all invaded the British Isles over a millennium and forced their words and culture on to the natives.
Second, we need to look at the rise of Britain and the US in recent centuries, which in turn tentacled their language, culture and values across the world, while English absorbed new and nuanced terms from where it liked, often keeping spelling intact. Oh, plus the Great Vowel Shift, Flemish printers and 19th-century-grammar purists.
Arika Okrent doesn’t get into why English has spread so widely in Highly Irregular: Why tough, through and dough don’t rhyme – and other oddities of the English, but she explains well why the language remains such a minefield for even educated native speakers, never mind those picking it up as a second or third tongue.
