A Plug for an Article Too Long to Post here
It’s about English’s complicated spelling rules. Here’s a paragraph from about halfway down to get you started. The whole article is worth the read.
The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press had arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent
Here’s the link again: https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-english-spelling-system-so-weird-and-inconsistent
—and here’s a picture:
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