[jabretti]

Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so.

The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like.

After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.

[ufo]

I think the spelling difficulties have more to do with English not having phonetic spelling than with it having many loanwords, prefixes or suffixes. I speak Portuguese and we have lots of loanwords as well but after a while they are all spelled like the rest of the words are instead of copying the original spelling. And every once in a while there is a spelling reform to replace archaic spellings with more modern forms (this never happened with English because it was politically unpopular)

[maffydub]

I think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vowels changed their pronunciation.

Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.

[pbhjpbhj]

How words are spelt (!) in en-gb definitely owes a debt to the word origin, or sometimes the imagined origin ...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-wei... has a couple of nice examples.

[pbhjpbhj]

When you say a thousand years ago presumably you mean the pre-French Norman language mixed with the Old English from 1066?

I'd go back to the Roman invasion, at least, and the mixing of Latin as the official language of Roman Britain with the Brytthonic language(s) [themselves already probably mixing with other earlier Celtic tongues].

Some of the Latin in English (and Cymraeg) was adopted via the Norman/French tongue but there's pretty clear evidence -- AFAICT, I'm not a linguist -- of Latin being retained and adopted from the occupation. That presumably gave us a Creole as a starting place to add in Germanic (Saxon, Frisian, Jutlandish), Celtic (Irish, Pictish?), and Nordic languages in the first millennium AD making the mixing of Norman French just more of the same??

So I'd say, "after two thousand years of this" ...

[baud147258]

As a French, I've always enjoyed finding words in English coming from French, but I've never though about latin words coming from the roman occupation. Thank you for sharing!

[pbhjpbhj]

Words like ffenestr and ysgol from Cymraeg show the adoption of Latin that you'd recognise in French (fenetre, ecole). Suggesting these words were already around in Old English from Latin.

It can be hard to tell the history though, eg sovereign came from French (rein) but got Latinised (regnare) in spelling reform.

One interesting thing for me was finding English loanwords in Cymraeg (former Welsh language) that are no longer used in English. I'll bet there are some French loanwords in English that aren't in French any more?

There are words adopted twice too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Fre... has lots of examples. Giving us chief and chef in English with different meanings but based on a single French word (I gather) adopted at different times.

[baud147258]

> I'll bet there are some French loanwords in English that aren't in French any more?

I don't know any and I don't think I'll be able to spot them since they aren't in French anymore.

But (from your link), there are words coming from Old French in English which then went back in French, but usually keeping the English pronunciation.