[daniel-s]

I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.

English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.

[tivert]

> I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.

Well, they like to pretend they have that kind of authority, those languages don't actually have a "boss" in charge of how the language works either.

IIRC, the French Academy has tried (and failed) to stamp out anglicisms like email (https://www.thoughtco.com/le-courriel-vocabulary-1371793) and weekend (https://www.lawlessfrench.com/tag/franglais/).

[prerok]

Indeed, that was what I was trying to say, but you put it more accurately. Thanks!

[kmeisthax]

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.

In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure.

In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom.

This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.

[0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians

[1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."

[2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.

[seszett]

> Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

That's something one hears quite often from English speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes from.

French is a quite decentralised language with each country having its own "regulator" but none of them have legal power. They are all just advisory organisations. Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Québec. The French ministry of education decides what is taught in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed by the other countries, but they don't deal with vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.

The Académie Française does invent words, but they have no official value or power. Their main occupation is documenting actual usage.

Most other European languages do have international, language wide regulators though, often with actual legal value, but French doesn't have anything like this.

I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing even less about the other languages than they know about French.

[YawningAngel]

I'm not sure I agree with your second footnote. Beowulf is written in Old English, which is quite hard for modern English speakers to read on account of being German. Middle English, however, I think you'd find fairly palatable. For example, the Peterborough Chronicle (https://adoneilson.com/eme/texts/peterborough_40.html) is _roughly_ contemporaneous with the Tale of Genji and is readable by modern English speakers.

[fivestones]

This looked as incomprehensible to me (a native English speaker) as a foreign language, albeit one with a bunch of scattered words I recognized…until I figured out that þ meant th and all the sudden I could mostly read it fine.

[gpvos]

The few Welsh and Gaelic speakers that remain entered the chat.