Dude. I read it just fine at first. Then I re-read it and by the time I got to “though” I figured it was gibberish you had just made it up as a silly tag to all the “t—gh” words. Then I thought: “Damn… that’s a word!”
English is so weird it can confuse a native English speaker (me) into not even recognizing a simple word!
ETA: I think a comma after “thought” would be good. But WTF do I know?
Couldn’t have explained it better myself.
And with the original Anglo-Saxon heavily influenced by Welsh and Danish before the French got their hands on it.
Please, this is a family message board.
I haven’t gone searching, but I’m subscribed to Lexicon Valley and History of English Podcast. The first guy has a tendency to play show tunes and old pop tunes as examples. The topics bounce around. The second guy has a voice that’s soothing enough that if you’re sleepy, it could send you off. It follows an outline and I’d suggest listening from the beginning.
On a scale of one to Troll, this was a zero. Nobody’s even irate.
“The first guy” (the host of Lexicon Valley) is the aforementioned John McWhorter, who’s also written a lot of quite accessible books on language, and is indeed a big musical theater buff, judging by the clips he uses in his podcast. McWhorter teaches at Columbia, and is probably one of the more prominent professional linguists working today.
The host of the History of English Podcast is Kevin Stroud. He’s a lawyer, not a professional linguist, but he is very knowledgeable on the topic. I second the recommendation to start listening to this one from the beginning, although it’s notable that his sense of weaving an ongoing narrative wasn’t quite as strong in the beginning. The podcast definitely improves as he goes along, and becomes more confident in what he’s doing. It’s also fun to notice, in one of the early episodes, that his original plan was to limit the podcast to 100 episodes: 1-25 on precursors to English, 26-50 on Old English, 51-75 on Middle English, and finally 76-100 on Modern English.
In fact, he’s up to episode 123 and is only just now getting to Chaucer. Obviously, like fighting ignorance, explaining the history of English is taking longer than he thought.
Lexicon Valley is a Slate podcast and is hosted by John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia. His shows are excellent although he does have an unnatural love of old show tunes so every show features a tune or two from a show, usually dating back pre-1970 although he has recently included a sample from the hit musical The Band’s Visit.
Another podcast about language that is well done is A Way With Words, although the focus is generally on the origins of obscure phrases rather than mainstream language evolution.
As to the OP, shrug maybe they’re a drive-by, maybe they only have access to the internet once a week. If we’re answering, then we’re having fun. Also making sure that anyone who wanders in via Google is properly notified that there were problems with the initial premise, but mostly we’re having fun. And I just found a new podcast to subscribe to, so: win.
No wonder it seem like people just made up all the words.
No offense, but I can’t imagine this question being asked by anyone but a small child or a troll, sorry. Even a person who speaks English as a second language should know this.
Unfortunately the Welsh influence on English is negligible. The Angles & Saxons were too busy killing the Welsh to talk with them. Once the Danish got done killing English and settled in, they talked with them plenty and creolized the northern dialects of Old English.
More examples of Rastafarian linguistics:
Overstand—The Queen of England cannot understand the Rastaman, but the Rastaman can overstand the Queen of England.
Downpression—You have to say downpression to tell the truth of the matter, not oppression, because there’s nothing “up” about it. Bob Marley sang “Woe to the downpressors.”
That reminds me of a demand manifesto from a group of nutbags to a university, where they spelled “history” as “hxstory” and “person” as “persxn” because they wanted to “degender” the words, but were actually demonstrating that they were about as knowledgeable about etymology as the OP.