Why do we use so many words that are spelled the same but have different meanings? And words that sound the same but are spelled different, such as…
Read, read, reed.
Which, witch
can, can
top, top
wait, weight
the list goes on and on.
Is there a particular reason for this?
I’m guessing it has something to do with the English language’s nack for stealing words from other languages and gradually changing the meaning and/or pronounciation. Their, there, and they’re are three words that can cause confusion among new speakers.
English may be oddly difficult for non native speakers, but at least it’s not Finnish 
Blame it on the Picts, Scots, Celts, Angles, Romans, Saxons, Normans, and occasional Vikings. Those darned survivors would just say anything, to avoid getting killed. Countries which get invaded as often as Britain tend to get linguistically twisted up pretty well.
“Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.” ~ Noah Webster ~
Many spellings reflect old pronunciation. EG, in Middle English, the “k” in “knife” was pronounced.
I’m amazed foreign learners get the hang of it…
Through …oo
Rough …uff
Cough …off
Dough …owe
Bough …ow
Lough …ock
Ugh …ugh!
Their, there and they’re are three words that can cause great confusion amongst native English speakers as well.
Along with year, yeah, your, you’re, etc etc.
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[Edited by bibliophage on 11-23-2001 at 10:15 PM]
preview, preview, PREVIEW!!!
And now I can’t post this because I have to wait 60secs or something, what’s with that??
Borrowing from other languages, as well as the orthography being frozen in what’s basically 14th century Eglish spelling (which at the time, the words were said differently). Of course there have been some revisions of spelling of some words.
This is one of my favorite subjects of exploration. I love English and all it’s weirdnesses - including the fact that I can make up a word like weirdnesses! Modern English, at it’s roots, is the product of the marriage of two very different base languages - Old English - which is related to all the Germanic languages, and Norman French which was forced upon those poor Saxons almost overnight in 1066, and, of course, is based on Latin. Of course, English is a borrowing language with words from many other languages, but it is proportionately and primarily, a blend of these two equally. You can tell a lot about the origin of English words by their spelling, and linguists use this to puzzle out the history of words. I happen to think it’s wonderful that English is so quirky -and that words are time capsules that can be opened and explored. A fabulous book on this is the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language - great to browse through with lots of pictures and easy to understand, readable info.
The last time Britain was invaded was 1066. Since then, they’ve mostly been exploring the world in search of new vocabulary.
I imagine that English would be mind-boggling to learn as a non-native speaker. I couldn’t imagine trying to explain that read is the past tense of read, but they are pronounced like the words red and reed, respectively. Meanwhile, led is the past tense of lead, but there is the unrelated word lead that is pronounced the same as led. While we’re on the subject, bead rhymes with reed, while dead rhymes with red, and there are also the words bed and deed. Head and heed follow the pattern of dead and deed.
>> The last time Britain was invaded was 1066
When Hitler learnt this little known fact he said “hey! it’s time to invade England!” Unfortunately he didn’t take the trouble to learn English language and manners first and he failed miserably.
Actually, the Normans didn’t have as much of an effect on our language as people say they did, although they did - the number of conquerers numbered only a few thousand. The French started pouring in about a century or two thereafter, when everybody liked France again (incidentally, the Battle of Agincourt happened around that time, too…). The biggest foreign influence on our language is said to be Old Norse. The Vikings stomped through England and settled there, keeping a pretty nice chunk of England for a while. Some towns still have Scandinavian names (like all that end in -by, for example), and some dialects have numbers of words used by the Scandinavian conquerers.
The reason for the sheer nuttiness of English, already stated, is that our language is the linguistic volleyball. Geez - first the Saxons, then the Vikings, then the Normans, and God knows who else. Also, our language’s structure makes for easy word borrowings - we have very few inflections to stick on words, and a very liberal syllable structure (a word like sprinkle is possible - that’s not possible in some other languages, like Japanese. They’d have to stick a few vowels between each consonant, and replace ‘le’ with ‘r’. It would look somewhat like sipurinker.).
hey… as a native speaker, this is obviously the time to come out and defend the language. finnish is a very rational language when you take the time to study it. for example, there are hardly any irregular verbs (to be, “olla”, is the only one i can think of right now…).
granted, though, the length of words can be intimidating… “helsingin kaupungin liikennelaitos” (the helsinki city department of public transport) scared the hell out of a friend of mine when she was first studying finnish. 
even so, she said that in the end, learning the language was easy because of the regularity of the formation of verb tenses and other such little gimmicks.
I just made a post in another thread , which is highly relevant to this one.
Without knowing how to pronounce a word, all you can do is take your best shot, be terribly wrong and get laughed at by native speakers because you inadvertently said a curse word.
In addition, many times the orthography was set from one dialect, and the common pronunciation was set from another one. In at least one case, namely victuals, the person who set the spelling went back to the latin spelling, even though it didn’t reflect the pronunciation.
The Smithsonian magazine had an article in December of last year called “Log-o-phil-ia Is Addictive” on this subject. Quote: “English has never met a word it didn’t like”. And if you’re a fellow logophile, Merriam-Webster has a word of the day site with a discussion about some interesting word every day.
Which reminds me of another influence: the Roman Empire, which conquered Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall. Towns ending in -cester, -caster, or -chester derive from the old Roman camps there, as the Latin word for camp is caster. Of course, when the Brits got around to it, they mangled the pronounciation horribly, as in Worcester or Leicester, where they removed a syllable for no terribly obvious reason.
Presumably, the Roman period had other impacts on the language.
Also, wasn’t French the official court language, and thus spoken by the aristocracy, until the 1600’s or so?
Virtually none, actually. When the Germanic tribes invaded England, they completely displaced/absorbed the Latin and Celtic speaking peoples without borrowing much of their languages. There were a few Latin words already in Old English that had been borrowed before the invasion (salt and wine, for example).
Later on though, there were many words borrowed directly from Latin, as opposed to borrowing Latin-derived words via French. For example, during the 17th century (I think), there was one guy who thought English had too many one syllable words, so he deliberately borrowed a bunch of multisyllable Latin words and used them in his writings. Not all of them took, but some did. He wasn’t the only writer who borrowed Latin words, but his reason for doing so was unusual.
I’m pretty sure that practice stopped in the 1400s. Well before that point, virtually all of the aristocracy were native English speakers and had to learn French as a second language.
Actually, the Roman occupation had very little direct influence on English beyond a few place names. The Latin-speaking officers didn’t have much to do with the natives (they used interpreters), and the ordinary troops were mostly recruited in Gaul, where they spoke Celtic languages pretty similar to those used by the natives.
Words with Latin roots mostly came from Norman French, mixing into Anglo-Saxon, which had pushed out the Celtic languages used in Roman times.
Then, of course, English travellers picked up even more words from all over the world and brought them home.
As a result, I like to say that English is half German, half Latin, and half everything else. (If you think that’s too many halves, that’s just the way English works.)
Pet Peeve Alert!
“It’s” is a contraction, and does not mean “belonging to it.” The latter would be “its” without the apostrophe.
I don’t know about French being used at the Royal court, but French was the official language in English law courts until 1731. (Though I believe it had ceased being used as a matter of practice a century earlier.)
English legal proceedings were carried out in what is now called “Law French,” a very peculiar dialect that mixed French, Latin, and English words. This did not come naturally to the lawyers: learning Law French was one of the main hurdles to becoming a lawyer.
Here’s someone’s essay on French in England during the Middle Ages, with a bit on Law French at the end:
There’s a very interesting book called The Mother Tongue that talks about all this stuff. As for the Law French, my almost-lawyer wife says this is the reason for phrases as “cease and desist” and “last will and testament”; one word with an Anglo-miscellaneous root and one with a French root.