Not Enough Letters

When you get right down to it, English is just a rubbish language.

Here's the problem: one of the single biggest innovations in the development of language was hit upon by the Phoenicians, and it was the notion of using letters to depict sounds, rather than using pictures to depict things. And with that it was suddenly possible to write the word for anything using a combination of only a few distinct letters. (Of course, that's also where we derive the word phonetic, and the idea of "sounding it out" when learnign unfamiliar words.)

So far, so good.

But then you get English, which is an utter nonsense of a language: we have letters where the sounds are modified by other nearby letters ('ch' rather than 'c' and 'h'; or pretty much any word ending in an 'e'); we have a set of mad rules with all manner of exceptions ('i' before 'e', except after 'c'... which is just weird); we have silent letters everywhere...

Fundamentally, we just have too few letters.

(Of course, the downside of that rant is that it also implicitly accepts that Americans are right with their policy of dropping the unnecessary 'u' in words like honour and armour, and replacing 's' with 'z' in words like organisation.)

Anyway, that's my rant for today.

#25: "Baptism of Fire", by Andrez Sapkowski