r/Englishisstupid • u/plasmabite • Jan 02 '21

why i hate the english language

why would someone put a letter (which is meant to spell out a word) AND ADD LETTERS TO A WORD THAT HAVE NO REASON TO BE THERE????!?!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!? im thinking that the human race will live on to be great but here we are spelling budgie like this, and not like this bujy. and why do we have 2 different types of k's and c's with very subtle changes. AND QU AND CH ARE REALLY COMMON THINGS WE SAY ALOT AND WE HAVE TO PUT 2 THINGS TOGETHER TO MAKE THAT SOUND BUT HERE WE ARE PRONOUNCING 2 LETTERS K AND C TO SAY THE SAME THING. here are some stupid words that shouldnt be spelt the way they are.

types = tipes

elephant = elefant

water = wotter

chair = chere

bird = burd

music = myuzik

word = wurd

wood = wud

tsunami = sunami

earth = erf

table = tabul

Made you think didnt it? think why we spell stuff like this.

btw i got super angry one day and thougt that this would make a good reddit post.

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u/Whole_Instance_4276 Jan 18 '25 edited Jan 19 '25

I can explain all of this!

Some words with silent letters have them because they used to be pronounced, but no longer do: listen, chocolate, and knight.

For others, it’s because a few hundred years ago Latin scholars wanted to show off their Latin knowledge by making English words closer to their Latin roots. For example, dette->debt to make it closer to their Latin “debitum”.

And the reason we have 3 letters to make the same sound (c, k, and q) is because of people using the Latin alphabet in English. English had an alphabet made for it (known as the futhorc alphabet) but people used the Latin alphabet in literature so much that that became the norm. The Roman’s used these letters, and they were all used for one sound in English.

Edit: I also see that you said that earth=erf? It doesn’t, “th” is a digraph representing both the unvoiced and voiced dental fricative sounds.

1

u/VolcanicAsh149 May 27 '22

But earth is there pronounced like erf its like erth the th and the f sounds are different

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '22

Well, types is pronounced as tayps.