The UK should do a major spelling reform and troll the shit out of the U.S and their then "archaic" English.

But this is someone complaining about an English word and how it is pronounced compared to spelling. Yes, it comes from another language. That is the entire reason English has a lot of examples like this.

You can work it out through tough thorough thought, though.

"Tough" ought to be written as "tuff"

Of all people, Gallagher made the point in the 80s. I think George Carlin also did a set about English words once.

Seriously!

We have a third grader, and he's pretty good at reading. Recently he has been arguing with us about the pronunciation of some new words from his homework.

The problem is, his arguments are sound! He's accurately following the rules he learned for sounding out words.

When this has come up in the past, all I've been able to do is acknowledge his argument and explain to him how English has all kinds of weird rules and exceptions, and it's the kind of thing you remember with experience using the words. Like, there is no new rule to learn, and you don't have to freak out about remembering all these exceptions. It will just come with time. (Because we all know there's nothing that kids like more than olds telling them to just wait or give it time, lol)

English is basically three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat

Even if you have heard an English word before, you're probably still pronouncing it wrong

FTFY

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Hero.

Saving the ecosystem one shitpost at a time

I blame the Danish

They stole the sound from French letters during the Franco-Swedish War.

WUH

Is that a German or English w?

I'm pretty sure she called you a mango

And you also have words like Wednesday...

Not always, the word skosh(meaning just a little bit or a tiny amount) comes from the Japanese word sukoshi(少し), but that can probably be attributed to the language not generally using romanized letters.

It's a very interesting word to me since its one of the very few words that migrated from Japanese to English and isn't a name of something. The way it came over is also rather interesting, as it was through collaboration between US and Japanese soldiers during the Korean war.

French in particular gets a lot of words with original spellings because it used to be the language of the courts in England.

I like liver noise