I really like languages whose phoneticism is reinforced through series of orthogtaphic reforms, because it gives them an aspect of regularity and predictability that is rare in non-written aspects of natural languages, since natural languages are fundamentally social and evolve over time.

But I also love the etymological richness of languages like English where little or no attempt is made to truncate the visible histories of loan words by normalizing their spellings (or pronunciation or grammar, for that matter— in English, spellings and pronunciations of words that are identical or similar to their original, foreign ones usually remain acceptable even as more Anglicized forms naturally develop alongside them). There's something magical about how rich the English language is with historical traces, even to foreign lands and tongues.

If you're attentive to spelling, English's orthographic conservatism also exposes the relationships between words to you in a way that spelling reforms can obscure. It lets us recycle words, too, so that words of ultimately identical roots (and sometimes grammatical role, too) come to bear different shades of meaning and connotation that reflect their histories. For better and for worse, words get to have a kind of 'path dependence' in English in this way.

A lot of the complaint about English spelling comes from a theory that the written form must be phonetic. This is reflected by the mistake of teaching American kids "phonics": giving them a bunch of post facto rules and then immediately telling them that there are innumerable exceptions to said rules.

As the article points out, a lot of the spelling reflects meaning (etymology) which is more useful when reading than the sound (unless, I suppose, you're reading out loud). The loose phonetic linkage is handy, but you end up simply learning a bunch of words, which is no different from learning Hanzi.

With most languages the spelling gives you enough information to figure out how to pronounce a word you've never heard before. Not with english. My last wrong guess: the writer Malcolm Lowry (/lauri/ instead of /louri/). Danish, same problem.

The article argues that English spelling inconsistencies were heavily driven by the printing press appearing in a period of overall spelling turmoil in English, due to the displacement of written English from ~1066 to 1300s.

As (basically) a native english speaker, does anyone know of how this works analogously in other European languages?

How consistent was French or German spelling around 1450?

The "blogger from 1990" huh?

I’ve always been curious about how delineating “queens English” affected other dialects of English

EDIT: Looks like the title’s been changed — it was previously ‘Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable?’.

Put simply, the title question can be answered as follows: 500 years of sound change, plus analogy, plus borrowing from other languages, plus a complete lack of standardisation.

Actually, all of these points are interesting, so let me elaborate:

• English spelling was ‘standardised’ (for lack of a better word) roughly ~500 years ago. Since that time, English pronunciation has changed considerably. Most prominently, the Great Vowel Shift [0] messed up the long vowels. To take just two examples, ⟨ee⟩ and ⟨oo⟩ used to be the same sounds as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩, just pronounced longer; however they now sound more like long versions of ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩. The old sound /x/ has disappeared, leaving silent ⟨gh⟩s everywhere. And the process continues today: in my dialect, final /l/ has vocalised, meaning words like ‘bottle’ should really be spelt like ⟨bottoo⟩. Even worse, some sound changes were sporadic (i.e. random): IIRC there was a sporadic change from /ɒ/ to /ʌ/ in some words, which is why ⟨won⟩ and ⟨dot⟩ have different vowels.

• At some times people liked to mess up the spelling of words to make them more similar to ‘related’ words — even when, on closer examination, there turns out to be no relation at all. Thus ⟨iland⟩ → ⟨island⟩ (by analogy with ⟨isle⟩); ⟨dout⟩ → ⟨doubt⟩ (by analogy with Latin ⟨dubitare⟩).

• Of course, a word borrowed from another language will obey different spelling rules. This is especially the case if it’s passed through another language on its way: e.g. ⟨rhino⟩ and ⟨archaeology⟩. (Ancient Greek distinguished ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨rh⟩ from ⟨c⟩ and ⟨r⟩; all four had separate letters, but Latin borrowed the former as digraphs.)

• For some reason, English spelling has proved very resistant to both standardisation and reform. The most successful attempt so far has been Websters’; American English adopted it partially, while British English did not, which of course just added to the confusion. (XKCD 927 is relevant here.) This may be contrasted to languages like Spanish, the more phonemic spelling of which is standardised and updated by the Real Academia Española.

Of course, it should be noted that English is not alone in its spelling. Irish spelling, for instance, is something I find practically impenetrable. French and Tibetan spelling systems are somewhat more regular, but both suffer from being formulated ~1000 years ago. (e.g. the well-known Tibetan name ‘Tashi’ is spelled བཀྲ་ཤིས་, in Roman letters ⟨bkra-shisl⟩, which is indeed how it would have been pronounced in the 9th century.) As always, Japanese is in a league of its own. But of the alphabetic systems, English is probably the worst.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

This article is interesting and all but I think it is missing some

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English has never been standardised because England didn't suffered an invasion (post 1066) or had a strong central authority the way other countries have had.

English isn't a "real" language. English started as old German (Angols and Saxons brought it over). Then the Norman invasion added a bunch of French words. And the grammar got massively simplified. Both these factors are to suit the invaders for instance cow is from the German Kuh, because peasants keep the cows. But Beef is from the French Boeuf because aristocrats eat the cows so they use the French word.

Over time we have added some Latin and Greek and basically any other language we could "borrow without asking" from.

The result is that every rule is at best a guideline. That the same sound is spelt differently in different words. And that different sounds and spelt the same in other words.

I'm a native English speaker and it must be a nightmare for anyone learning it. I speak ok German but I can spell most words in German effortlessly because German spelling makes sense. Because it was nice ver such a mess and it's regularly standardised.