# Why is English so stupid?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [June 23, 2002, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534 "2002-06-23T04:31:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/1 "2002-06-23T04:31:38Z")
You really **ough** t not go thr **ough** there, as the caretakers don’t do a thor **ough** job of clearing those r **ough** b **ough** s, and the weeds by the l **ouch** will make you c **ough**.
Can’t we at least decide on pronunciations that are constant?
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### Author:  [@sundog66](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sundog66)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/2 "2002-06-23T04:43:44Z")
I don’t think it’s the pronunciation that’s unconstant, it’s the spelling. I personally believe that the point of spelling a word is to tell you what the word is, not to tell you how the word is pronounced. For that, you should hear somebody say it. However, as a mnemonic convention, English, and many other languages, symbolize their words on paper by means of indicating (roughly) how they are pronounced. One of the reasons that English has odd spelling is that our pronunciation has shifted while our spelling has not. For example, “night” used to be pronounced “neekht”, as it is spelled. Anyway, I would not venture to call a language, which is the product of common human intellect, stupid, just because the means used to write it out do not indicate its pronunciation to a tee.
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### Author:  [@Critical1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Critical1)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/3 "2002-06-23T04:50:31Z")
the rules for written english (as I understand it) were done up by lawyers employed by royalty (and who were paid by the word to write letters for the illiterate) to make it very difficult for commoners to learn to read and write. thus the only rule in the entire english language without and exception is the one that says theres and exception to every rule.
and as Sundog66 points out there have been significant shifts in the way words are pronounced in the centuries since the spellings were put down. like doughnut used to be Dowknut or some crap like that. you would actually pronounce the k in things like knowledge and knife.
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### Author:  [@postcards](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/postcards)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/4 "2002-06-23T04:56:11Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by sundog66 \*
> \*\* For example, “night” used to be pronounced “neekht”, as it is spelled. \*\*
When, and by whom?
Also, I think you meant to say ‘inconsistant’, rather than ‘unconstant’.
We have enough nonsensical words in this language, no need to be adding more…
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### Author:  [@partly\_warmer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/partly_warmer)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/5 "2002-06-23T05:18:54Z")
Before this gets started, this subject has been very well discussed. English isn’t much more or less rational than other languages, and attempts to make a “pure” language, such as Esperanto, have not met overall enthusiasm.
The “problem”, for those new to it, is three-fold: 1) all languages borrow from others, others that have different rules; 2) language drifts, so that original purposes for spelling change; 3) nationalists sometimes change language purposefully to make a political point.
In sum, you want perfect, but native speakers like their languages they way they are.
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### Author:  [@sundog66](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sundog66)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/6 "2002-06-23T06:02:19Z")
Yeah, sorry about “unconstant”, I thought that looked strange somehow. As for the antiquated pronunciation of “night”, I refer you to page 69 of The Story of English, by William Cran, Robert MacNeil, and Robert McCrum. But basically, it was pronounced “neekht” by the people of England in the 15th century.
Critical1, do you have a source of info concerning lawyers diliberately obfuscating English spelling? It sounds fishy…
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### Author:  [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 9:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/7 "2002-06-23T09:43:29Z")
> [@](#):
>
> -
>
> When, and by whom?
>
> \*\*
By the English people of Chaucer`s time and before. The Scots still retain this pronunciation, as `nicht`. Many of what we would think of as redundant letters in English were originally pronounced in full, eg the `k`and`gh`in`knight`.
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### Author:  [@Doug\_Bowe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doug_Bowe)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 9:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/8 "2002-06-23T09:46:24Z")
The same book Sundog refers to (and to the PBS series) even presents a suspect…Wm. Caxton.
Mr. Caxton set up his printing press at the very end of the Middle English period and fixed spelling before there was a consensus.
This is not the answer to all the problems of the English writing system (the OP is dissing the writing system), but it’s a nice starting point.
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### Author:  [@femtosecond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/femtosecond)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 11:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/9 "2002-06-23T11:13:14Z")
> [@](#):
>
> _Originally posted by postcards_
> \*\*Also, I think you meant to say ‘inconsistant’, rather than ‘unconstant’.
>
> We have enough nonsensical words in this language, no need to be adding more…\*\*
[http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=unconstant](http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=unconstant)
> [@](#):
>
> **unconstant** \Un_con"stant, a. Not constant; inconstant; fickle; changeable. [Obs.] --Shak. – Un_con"stant_ly, adv. [Obs.] – Un_con"stant\*ness, n. [Obs.]
>
> Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
It’s listet as being obsolete, so **sundog66** wasn’t really the one _adding_ it to the language.
Also, I think _you_ meant to say ‘inconsist **e** nt’, rather than ‘inconsistant’. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/10 "2002-06-23T11:56:16Z")
The fact is that there was no central body setting down English spelling rules. Publishers did it however they wanted. If you look at Chaucer, you’ll notice that he isn’t consistent in spelling. At the time the belief was that you should spell to conform to your own pronunciation and pronuncation varied widely in a number of dialects throughout England. There was some resistance to standardisation. Many times, the spelling of one dialect would become standard, but the pronuncation of another would become standard. And then pronuncations and spellings continued to change. To keep English spelling consistent with pronuncation, we’d have to keep readjusting the spelling. But here’s another question: according to whose pronuncation?
There’s no conspiracy here.
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### Author:  [@ratty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ratty)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/11 "2002-06-23T12:45:35Z")
Here’s the thing: from everything I’ve learned from studies of linguistics, it would seem that English spelling is more or less a faithful reproduction of the way English was pronounced roughly three to four hundred years ago in London.
This is because London was the center of commerce for Britain; most books were printed there; it had the largest population in the country, etc.)
English spelling was not completely standardized until fairly recently, perhaps 100-150 years ago. ‘Completely’ is also not quite true; spellings are different in different Anglophonic countries, a famous example being whether or not one puts a ‘u’ in words like ‘humor’ and ‘color’, which the British and Canadians do, but Americans don’t. You can also find various accepted spellings for certain words in most dictionaries, some of this being again based on national differences: ‘gaol’ and ‘jail’, ‘phial’ and ‘vial’ spring to mind.
Unlike French, which has a national institution of language and spelling (L’Academie Francaise), English has no such organization, and it was mainly left up to the editors and printers of dictionaries to standardize spelling, and even, in certain cases, to fix a word’s meaning.
But again, English is no more outlandish than any other language. Language is composed of auditory and, in writing, visual symbols designed to convey a speaker’s thoughts. Though it works remarkably well, things wil always be lost in translation, and meanings, pronunciations, etc., will change over time. Language is not a dry and dusty subject for textbook study or torture of high school kids; it is some ways more comparable to a living organism, constantly evolving and changing in response to various pressures.
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### Author:  [@partly\_warmer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/partly_warmer)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/12 "2002-06-23T13:41:30Z")
English is NOT “more or less a faithful reproduction of Elizabethian pronunciation”. Get an Oxford English Dictionary.
Or consult a scholarly, annotated Shakespeare.
English gets created and reformed at the same rate as any other language. There are pronunciations that come from before 1600 and ones that come from afterwards, for example, when a word was coined, or when it entered common useage. There are many more that have changed over time.
We don’t have an “Academie Francaise” because we had better sense than to try and stop the tide.
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### Author:  [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/13 "2002-06-23T14:23:08Z")
Most of the posts on this thread have been quite sensible so I will use this reply to explain why I think spelling reform is quite senseless. I recently read somewhere someone who wanted to make spelling phonetic by, among other things, adding accents so that there would be a 1-1 correspondence between sound and orthography. First, an esthetic judgment: English text looks nicer because it lacks accents. Second, it is much slower to write, say, French and German because you have to go back and add accents (for the same reason I would welcome changes to handwriting that eliminated the dot on the i and the cross on the t). Third, the person proposing this also had no idea how many distinct vowel sounds English actually has. In fact, the number is unconstant, varying with dialect. I once read that the number varies from 22 to 24. I have never tried to count, but that seems about right. But the main problem is, whose dialect? There are British and US dialects, of course, but also India, Australia, New Zealand, various Caribbean islands and probably others. Although the Brits would naturally assume that their dialect (or one of them, anyway) would become the standard, they would be dreaming in colours. American English has become the standard. But which American English? In my native dialect, “sad” does not rhyme with “mad” (the first has a lax vowel, the latter’s is tense) nor is “can” (modal) homophonic with “can” (verb and noun). My plural for “house” is regular, while the standard pronunciation is irregular. Shall we spell it “houses” or “houzes” (or rather “housez” or "houzez)? Fifty miles south of where I grew up, they said “greazy” instead of “greasy”. Of the four, “Mary”, “marry”, “merry”, and “Murray”, I say the first three differently, but the third and fourth the same, while other people divide them very differently and my wife claims to say all four differently (I don’t hear the distinction she is making between the last 2); she grew up 90 miles away from me. And so it goes.
As for all the “ough” words, my understanding is that all the pronunciations were standard in one part of England or other and when all the local dialects came together to make the London mishmash, different pronunciations prevailed for different words.
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### Author:  [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/14 "2002-06-23T20:46:13Z")
An interesting book on this subject is **The Mother Tongue** by Bill Bryson. He a humor writer, but there is more than enough scholarship in this book to make it worthwhile.
The basic answer to the OP question has been alluded to: English has influences from many languages and periods, and derives much of both its strangeness and vigor from this. Expecting uniform pronounciation rules is kind of like expecting Spanish and German tastes in food to be the same.
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### Author:  [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/15 "2002-06-23T22:03:04Z")
.
> [@](#):
>
> Although the Brits would naturally assume that their dialect would become the standard, American English has become the standard
Why do you think so?
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### Author:  [@TheeGrumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheeGrumpy)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 10:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/16 "2002-06-23T22:10:40Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Critical1 \*
> \*\*the rules for written english (as I understand it) were done up by lawyers employed by royalty (and who were paid by the word…
That would explain the silly “Never end a sentence with a preposition” rule! It’s so obviously the result of payola from the “Which/Whom” lobby. Without the rule, those words would be far less necessary.
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### Author:  [@E72521](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E72521)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/17 "2002-06-23T22:50:45Z")
Perhaps it is because the populations of the United States and english speaking Canada outnumber the rest of the english speaking world.
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### Author:  [@dougie\_monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougie_monty)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/18 "2002-06-23T22:59:55Z")
All these posts seem to provide a perfect basis for my disagreement with the notion that English, of any region of the world, should become (or already is) the “international” language. The idiosyncracies of English seem to suffice to discourage foreign speakers from learning the language.
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### Author:  [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/19 "2002-06-23T23:18:00Z")
[hijack]
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by dougie\_monty \*
> \*\*The idiosyncracies of English seem to suffice to discourage foreign speakers from learning the language. \*\*
You’re kidding, right?
English is spoken as a second language by far more people than any other tongue. It is the _de facto_ language of computer programming, and of international air traffic control, and of inter-cultural academia. The Yemeni professor and the Japanese businessman at an international conference are not going to connverse in Arabic or Japanese – they’re going to communicate in English. A Myanmarese pilot landing a plane in Rome is going to communicate with the Italian air traffic controller in English.
The examples I give are the barest tip of the iceberg.
[/hijack]
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### Author:  [@hegel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hegel)
#### Post date: [June 23, 2002, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-english-so-stupid/115534/20 "2002-06-23T23:18:36Z")
Add another famous Doper to the list–Gallagher, aka Rysto.
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