English language wackness

A few things about the English language

What’s up with the -let suffix? It’s rarely used, but computer people might be latching on to it. For example, in applet, servlet, and the aforementioned cmdlet. Seems to be borrowed from the French -ette.

And then there’s the issue of not speaking the way things are spelled. (Or is it the same thing?) What happened to the British R? Apparently, that can’t be answered without lots of nightmarish linguistic terms.

So why is English such an insane language? If you try to spell things logically (the way they sound), you’re a bad speller. I mean, we wouldn’t want anything to be logically spelled. Currently, good spelling only comes through lots of experience. There’s apparently a small movement to fix the language. Unfortunately, it sounds like the problems in sorting this out are huge. English is a mishmash of Latin, Greek, French, Germanic, and other terms. If you pick one of those styles, you have to run the whole language through the grinder to make it consistent with that style.

Intentional Stuttering

Did you ever notice that some stuttering is intentional? You might even do it yourself to emphasize a point, allow the listener time to think, or repeat a syllable because someone just coughed and you may not have been heardat least those are my theories. I think I catch myself doing it occasionally. It could just be learned from hearing others though.