why the fuck dont we have different letters for A in cat and A in art??? they are completely different sounds! runes had seperate leters for both those A sounds!
>>18438559That's why we put the 'r' in there, retard
>>18438566Like in rat?
What are you on unc
>>18438559because after the norman conquest all the letters they were unfamiliar with were disposed of.
>>18438559Because we have functional brains that are capable of understanding context?Some written languages like Abjads don't even have vowels, they only have consonants, this is because a lot of cultures didn't even really see vowels as their own letters, but rather just sounds you make when transitioning between consonants, so the particular vowel-sounds are dependent on context. So for example, when I call you a fggt, you probably have a good understanding of what I just said.
>>18438559They would have been the same sound at the time the orthography was established. English seems to have had an unusually large amount of sound shifts, and spelling hasn't always kept up with it. Looks like the change was between Early Modern and Modern English, can't find it on the page for the famous Great Vowel Shift so maybe it was even after that.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English#Development_of_Middle_English_vowels
>>18438559because linguistics did not experience widespread formalization until recent centuries. alphabets were just copied from other languages even though the phonologies of these languages called for different writing systems/letters
you need to make your language complicated so it's harder for spies, and foreigners in general, to blend in
>>18438559>de engles es too hard for me señorLol @ this ESL beaner
>>18438997Kind of a mute point for the USA where German accented immigrant Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, Polish accented immigrant Zbigniew was Presidential Councilor, and Georgian accented immigrant Shalikashvili was Army Chief of Staff
because english is retarded
>>18438559English has 26 letters but over 40 phonemes, so there's a lot of overlap between single letters. Fug, you reminded me I have an early literacy exam coming up.
>>18438579he's talking about the difference between æ and ɑ but this is just one of the many difficulties with the English language and its strange ways>>18438559there used to be but of all the things the prescriptivists decided to ruin reintroducing phonetic letters was not one of themEnglish is too weird and changed too quickly for any kind of standardization to work and at this point it's just best to let it chug along uninterrupted
>>18438559Because pronunciations keep changing due to the natural evolution of language. There are a million things we could change to make the writing system better, but you know what? It's not worth the effort, because even if we did that, sounds would shift away again anyway.
>>18438559What are you talking about, it's the same vowel sound.You aren't even getting at the difference between the 'A' in 'pAsta' vs 'Air'
>>18438559The A in cat is close to what German and Scandinavian languages write as Ä/Æ. English also used to have Æ, but for some reason it was removed.
