Why is English spelling is so weird?

[LONDONER]

Just about everyone must have wondered at some time.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/62995/why...g-so-weird

[Jay]

Bit random but still about English.

I remember 'arguing' with my English teacher on the difference of Shuttle with Rocket. I kept telling him that shuttle and rocket are basically the same thing. We argued for several minutes during English class. Other students just stared at us arguing.

I was in standard 4 (10 years old) at the time.

[Insertnamehere]

Weird?

I find it easier and more compact than my own native language.

[LONDONER]

Weird?

I find it easier and more compact than my own native language.

Spanish (if that is your native language) spelling has rules and is comparatively easy, it's the grammar that is the bugbear.

[himself]

Me and friends used to play a game where we talk really fast and the rest try not to listen to the words, just the noise and we thought it was hysterical we sounded just like foreigners and we always used to think of weird words, we would all be sitting there and someone will blurt out a word and we all agree how weird it is and un-english sounding.

I have real problems with spelling some types of words, now I know who to blame.. Latin..

Language and words really are wonderful, there's nothing better really.

Somebody no better than us created every word out of scratch. I love to look back at the origins of every word.

ps - If English is weird then what the hell is Welsh?

Weird but regular (I assume). I'm not sure what they were thinking with that town name. "These people can't read anyway," perhaps.

[thawoods]

omg, that post by [MENTION=23123]Alto[/MENTION] ...

[thawoods]

Sometimes I thought that I saw a beard with a bird.

[thawoods]

Why do wallets never sound like sachets, and how long will the people of Calais learn to do ballet?

[Emiliano]

That was really interesting, and i liked the animation that goes with it too. Language is crazy fascinating, you can trace human history through how we speak.

[Confuzzled4]

If I had to say why it's so difficult, it's because there's so much borrowing from other languages. It's certainly true that English has a lot of Latin and Greek roots, but it's a Germanic language that has many words borrowed from French, and some borrowed from Spanish as well. English in general is a pretty hard language.