'Read' and its past tense are spelled the same. How should they be spelled?
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Thing is, reasonable languages adapt loan words to their own rules to make their speakers' lives easier.
English, though? Nah, English just stalks other languages in dark alleys, stabs them, rips some random words off, and runs away giggling like a maniac, bits of the original language dragging behind, leaving a trail of gore.
That's how you end up with things like façade, or naïve, or fiancé, or the plural of radius being radii, or château / châteaux, or referendum / referenda, and so on, turning what should be a matter of just applying some standard rules into a veritable minefield of non-standard forms which must be memorised by its speakers.
It does make learning other languages fun. Currently in the middle of French, and there's so many words i already know. Eg:
- Déjà vu - already seen
- Cul-de-sac - butt (bottom) of the bag
- Laissez faire - let do/let make
- Lieu - place
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Reading is a place itself, the football club is the club for that place
Indeed, I just blurted out the biggest association in my mind to the place
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Are the first 2 lines really different?
Genuine question from a non native speaker.
Ehh technically I think they are the same but in common pronunciation they differ subtly. Don't overthink it though.
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Maybe to reed (infinitive) and read (past tense), but you can usually infer which one it is from context so no need to change the spelling.
"I read a lot of books about English spelling!"
Is this past tense?
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It's because the people who set the rules for the English language, could barely speak it.
The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch, so the guy who bought England's first one didn't know how it worked and neither did any English speaker
So he hired a bunch of Dutch who knew how to operate it.
And they got a bunch of handwritten books and were told to mass reproduce them.
Sometimes it was a mistake in the original, sometimes the typesetter made a mistake. Sometimes the writer just disagreed with how it should be written, and sometimes even the typesetters who couldn't speak English made choices to change it
No one gave a fuck about accuracy, it was about pumping out as many books as possible. Because just owning a book was a huge status symbol still from when they were handwritten and crazy expensive.
But all those books eventually got read, and the people who learned to read them were very proud that they could read. So they insisted that all the random bullshit was intentional and had to be followed to a T by everyone forever.
Most other languages had a noble class who kept it sensical, but for a long ass time only peasants spoke English, the wealthy in England all spoke French, cuz they were French.
Anyways, that's why English doesn't make any sense. There was also a natural thing happening where vowel pronunciation was changing. So when the typecasters solidified everything, it was already in a state of flux. That's why pronunciation doesn't line up with spelling.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The first guy to popularize the printing press was Dutch
Are you talking about Johannes Gutenberg?
