English got fucked… hard… because so many of the spellings came from people that had weird goals.
Consider phial. Why do we spell it that way? Because some jackass decided that english needed to be more latiny and ph is more latiny than v. (or maybe it was greek? I don’t remember the exact etymology)
Seeing the first person to spell subtle with a b
It didn’t use to, the b was added back in cause the Latin word has one and making words look like Latin was all the rage at one point.
At least “subtle” is ultimately from Latin, and the Latin word (subtilis) does have a /b/.
There are worse cases - like the “s” in “island”. It was never pronounced.
Captain, I think we’ve hit a reef!
No…is land!
I think I can confidently say there is someone out there somewhere that pronounces it.
“Hey, Willum, come over here and look at this misspelling of ‘Suttel’. It’s just better isn’t it?”
English got fucked… hard… because so many of the spellings came from people that had weird goals.
Consider phial. Why do we spell it that way? Because some jackass decided that english needed to be more latiny and
phis more latiny thanv. (or maybe it was greek? I don’t remember the exact etymology)Anglish is an attempt to reverse that, and remove Latin, Greek, and French words from English.
Hah that’s interesting, a lot of this wiki is quite easy to decipher as a Dutch and English speaker