[tracker1]

Possibly... English has a lot of linguistics with a lot of varied roots. You have many words taken from Old Norse and other Scandinavian influence as well as Latin, French and via proxy Greek derived words. Great Britain was highly fought over, contested, changed hands and merged cultures over the millennia.

It is far more organic and mixed from different sources than many prescribed languages or very local dialects of other languages. It would be very hard to pin that down. Not to mention the history of printing presses themselves, such as how the Thorn character was itself replaced as well as deprecating a few other characters that were in common use in earlier Old English.

[asveikau]

I think it's a mistake to view that situation as unique to English.

Spain is still a multi lingual country with several local languages each of them centuries old. But even ignoring that and focusing only on Castilian, there were invasions by goths, who left behind words like ropa or guardar, and Arabic speakers, who left behind words like almacén.

Like English having both cow and beef, there are words with historical overlap but different etymologies and divergent meaning over time. For example almacén and bodega were both words for a warehouse.

There are also tons of words where Spanish had phonetically diverged from latin, but then the same word was re-imported from latin in "educated" use.

[cpursley]

What’s that have to do with how terrible the English writing system is? Why not just reform written English to read the same way it’s sounds? I’m maybe a B2 level Russian learner and can near perfectly pronounce almost any modern Russian writing because it’s written almost exactly the way it’s spoken. I assume it’s the same with many other languages.

[justahuman74]

Go to England and try to get even two small towns to agree on what the sounds are

[sroussey]

That’s funny!

But really, these days we have Hollywood and it sorta decides what English sounds like. Even if it sounds different in your town in the USA.

[cpursley]

This does not even account for the bizarre spelling of many (most?) English words. For example, letters that are skipped.

[thefringthing]

The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.

To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info

[WorldMaker]

Plus the Enlightenment reimported a lot of Greek for science and made a lot of greek morphology productive in the language again or for the first time, at least in scientific vernacular and jargon, but a lot of that makes it into daily use. (It's also why we still have fun debates today over plurals like octopi versus octopuses or matrices versus matrixes; do we follow the Greek morphology through to its Greek plurals or do we just use the boring English plural morphology? We use both, but which you use becomes in part a signifier of "learnedness" or rule-following. As a learnéd nonconformist, I find it more fun to use the English plural morphology here more often than not, but also sometimes silly uses of díacritics.)

Plus English still is extremely active (to this day) in borrowing words from neighboring languages, with a lot of Spanish words directly borrowed (generally from Mexican/Dominican/Puerto Rican influences in US English, then back out to UK English). There are even French words in today's English that weren't Norman Conquest imports, but American Revolution imports (the French were key US allies and neighbors in the Canadian and Louisiana Territories).

There's a lot of jokes/memes that English has always been a language willing to borrow the best words of any language in a similar way that school bullies are often looking for new sources of milk money to extort.