English isn’t stupid. It’s organic. Just like any other language. Two native English speakers can communicate with each other clearly and easily, which is the point of language. Saying a language is stupid because it is difficult to learn by non-native speakers, or because it is easy to get your wrist slapped by a hard-nosed grammarian is just hand-wringing.
Learn about the Great Vowel Shift and how the timing for it, as well as the timing of the printing press, created a mess of a language with few consistent rules. It’s a stupid (written) language because history made it that way.
I mean, you are kind of missing my point. Native English speakers (or writers) can communicate easily with each other. That is literally the only thing that matters in a language. The consistency of grammatical rules is irrelevant.
I didn’t miss your point. You missed mine, which I clarified by adding (written) to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about spoken language. We can speak. That’s fine. The book that I initially referenced is about the written language and I made an effort to clarify that. You didn’t pick up that I was only calling the written language stupid. But I also talked about the introduction of the printing press relative to the Great Vowel Shift, and you missed that too. It was always about writing, spelling, pronunciation, and grammatical rules: things that don’t matter in spoken language.
English isn’t stupid. It’s organic. Just like any other language. Two native English speakers can communicate with each other clearly and easily, which is the point of language. Saying a language is stupid because it is difficult to learn by non-native speakers, or because it is easy to get your wrist slapped by a hard-nosed grammarian is just hand-wringing.
Learn about the Great Vowel Shift and how the timing for it, as well as the timing of the printing press, created a mess of a language with few consistent rules. It’s a stupid (written) language because history made it that way.
I mean, you are kind of missing my point. Native English speakers (or writers) can communicate easily with each other. That is literally the only thing that matters in a language. The consistency of grammatical rules is irrelevant.
I didn’t miss your point. You missed mine, which I clarified by adding (written) to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about spoken language. We can speak. That’s fine. The book that I initially referenced is about the written language and I made an effort to clarify that. You didn’t pick up that I was only calling the written language stupid. But I also talked about the introduction of the printing press relative to the Great Vowel Shift, and you missed that too. It was always about writing, spelling, pronunciation, and grammatical rules: things that don’t matter in spoken language.