I’ve been trying to learn a new language (Vietnamese) and a thing that has been driving me crazy are all these instances of letters being randomly pronounced differently in different words sometimes. If you don’t think about it too much, it’s easy to go “this language is dumb, why do they do this?” But then I think about English and we have so many examples of this or other linguistic oddities that make no sense but which I’ve just accepted since I learned them so long ago.
So I wanted to generalize my question: For all the languages where this applies, why are there these cases where letters have inconsistent pronunciations? For cases where it sounds like another letter, why not just use that one? For cases where the letter or combination of letters creates a new sound not already covered by existing letters, why not make a new one? How did this happen? What is the history? Is there linguistic logic to it beyond these being quirks of how the languages historically developed?
Huh. I hadn’t even considered how technology might affect this. Interesting.
Yeah, English is the go-to example because the first people to run printing presses in English were Dutch and couldn’t really spell or speak English.
There was likely similar situations in Asia as well, I’m just not familiar with their history.
But go back far enough and even writing by hand is technology
English was written long before the printing press. However it always (at least to my knowledge) used the latin alphabet which predates any written English I can find by more than 1000 years. Note that I’m not an expert on English linguistics, so if is someone claims something before 1200 I’m not aware of it but that doesn’t mean they are wrong.