Kachi wrote:
Edit: Little history lesson. A lot of the ridiculous rules in English stem directly from an intentionally imposed class stratification in feudal Europe when wealthier merchants who were decidedly neither nobel nor mere peasant wanted a way to distinguish themselves from the poor. If you were poor and uneducated, you wouldn't be able to learn the rules because they were nonsensical and arbitrary.
Even the alphabet is a mess. We have no single letter for the sounds "ch" or "th" yet we have completely useless letters like c, x, and q.
So really, I don't blame our enlightened little society for not being able to promote mastery of the English language by grade 12, even though it could be done by grade 3 or so (vocabulary development aside).
Most of those "ridiculous rules" of English grammar were invented out of whole cloth in the
17th to 19th centuries by "grammarians" who thought English should be modeled after Latin, or decried constructions like the double negative as illogical.
At
no point was there some kind of concerted effort to complicate the rules of English grammar to enforce social stratification.
As far as spelling goes, English's tricky spelling is a result of three factors:
1) English was shoehorned into an alphabet taken from a language with completely different phonology. Latin had 5 vowels; English has 15... You try representing 39 phonemes with only 26 letters.
2) Certain spellings were changed primarily for aesthetic reasons.
3) Orthography is highly resistant to change, which means that written English has not kept pace with the last 500 years of English's evolution.
This is why we write "The check is in the mail. I won't come in your mouth." instead of "ÃÄ“ cek iz in ðē mÄl. Ī wÅn't kum in yÅ«r mauþ."
