English is a complex language that at times, makes no sense.
For example, adding a comma to a sentence changes its meaning dramatically.
‘Let’s eat, grandma’ is very different with the comma removed, ‘let’s eat grandma’.
I spent 30 years living in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa, and while being able to speak Afrikaans was required at a school level, the predominant language was English.
As a native English speaker, some of its intricacies slipped by unnoticed.
When you learn a language spoken since birth, fluidity is accompanied by blind acceptance.
The English language gaslights its own speakers.
Consider the word ‘phonetically’ which means reading a word the way it sounds.
So pah-hone-ically then?
Nope.
If I had control over the Oxford dictionary able to make changes, I’d do this.
Pheasant, why the ‘ph’ and a ‘f’?
It would become ‘fessent’.
Borough, why not ‘burra’.
The word rough sounds like a clearing of the throat when pronounced phonetically, so why not change it to ‘ruff’?
Ballet would be ‘ballay’.
Chalet would be ‘shallay’.
Fresh off the boat, I saw multiple cinema complexes with the branding Reading Cinemas.
I genuinely thought they were cinemas for the deaf.
Reading, right?
It’s where a person who is hearing impaired watches a movie with subtitles.
How inclusive, I thought, but the bubble was burst when I was told it was ‘redding’ not reading.
Wait, no, I speak English so why is reading pronounced ‘radding’ and not ‘reeding’.
The confusion multiplied when my little sister got a job in the UK at a pub in Reading and that was also pronounced ‘redding’.
And those are Englishmen bruv, proper English speaking and all innit?
And don’t get me started on the Maroons.
Why is it that the rugby league team Maroons is the only instance where the word is pronounced ‘marones’.
Maroon is a colour and pronounced correctly until you’re talking about the rugby league team.
English is absolutely riddled with letters that just show up and refuse to do any actual work.
They sit there like unpaid interns, making words look fancier while contributing nothing to pronunciation.
The English language is less a system and more a loosely supervised experiment that got out of hand sometime around the 14th century and has been apologising ever since.
Take spelling.
English spelling is what happens when several countries contribute letters to a word like it’s a group birthday card, but no one talks to each other first.
Pronunciation doesn’t help.
English has rules, certainly—but they are more like polite suggestions.
We’re told “i before e except after c,” which is reassuring until you meet weird, height, their, science, and realise the rule has packed its bags and moved to another language entirely.
Then there’s colonel, which is pronounced “kernel” for reasons that appear to involve historical mischief and a shrug.
Plurals are another adventure.
One goose, two geese.
Lovely. One moose, two moose.
Fine. One house, two hice—no, wait, houses.
One cactus, two cacti, unless you’re feeling casual, in which case it’s cactuses, which sounds like something a toddler would insist on and somehow be correct.
Meanwhile sheep remains stubbornly singular and plural at the same time, as if it simply refuses to participate.
And don’t get me started on homophones, words that sound identical but mean completely different things, just to keep everyone alert.
There’s ‘there, their, and they’re’, a trio responsible for more quiet rage than peak-hour traffic.
Or to, too, and two, which form a sort of grammatical obstacle course designed to trip up even the most confident writer at precisely the wrong moment.
And yet, despite all this, or perhaps because of it, English persists.
It absorbs words from other languages like a magpie with a passport, cheerfully borrowing, bending, and occasionally butchering them into something new.
it is gloriously inconsistent, wildly unpredictable, and somehow still manages to get the job done.
In the end, learning English isn’t about mastering rules, it’s about developing a sense of humour, a tolerance for nonsense, and a quiet acceptance that sometimes queue is spelled with four letters you don’t pronounce, simply because English can.
