No one takes as many pages as English to explain all the ex… - Arika Okrent

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No one takes as many pages as English to explain all the exceptions, all the irregularities, and it's really the matching of the spelling to the pronunciation that causes a huge headache for learners of the language

Arika Okrent

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About Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is an American linguist, known especially for her book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, the result of five years of research on the subject of constructed languages.

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English is also very prolific borrower of words from other languages, but that's not entirely to blame for the inconsistencies

We were also spelling that oo sound as ou, because that's how they spell that sound in French, so it made sense that moon had that spelling but then the spelling didn't make sense anymore after the sound shifted, then it shifted again, but in some places it didn't

The weird things about English got baked in from the very beginning, especially with respect to the printing press … and all languages change over time but printing press caught English at a very bad moment

No one takes as many pages as English to explain all the exceptions, all the irregularities, and it's really the matching of the spelling to the pron… - Arika Okrent

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