Weird English

> Okrent mostly attributes English’s idiosyncrasies to the barbarians, the French, the printing press, and what she calls “the snobs.” ...

> At other times, standardization was deliberate. Those whom Okrent labels “snobs,” primarily 18th-century linguists, publishers, and pedants addicted to “intentional meddling,” consciously manipulated the language. Their meddling included the introduction of the supposedly sophisticated silent letters in doubt, indict, receipt, and salmon, as well as the Hellenized spellings of medical terms that originated as diaria, asma¸ and fleume.

Nearly all sources I can find point to that same Etymonline entry.

My understanding is more like https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is-responsible-for-the-... :

> British pedants, making a wrong guess, as they often did. Surprisingly, isle and island do not have the same origin. ...

> Isle comes from the French île (courtesy of the Normans). In Middle English it was spelled ile or ille. ..

> This ultimately comes from the Latin insula, and in Renaissance France some pedants tried to change it to isle, but ultimately failed. ...

> British pedants had more success, having decided that spellings should indicate classical origins at the expense of pronunciation. This had the advantage that it made spelling harder for those without the benefit of a classical education, and provided an opportunity for schoolboys to mock their lesser colleagues.

> They had some justification for isle (though it was a stupid rule). However, they also changed iland to island, incorrectly assuming common origins.

The "indicate classical origins" is from the (false) belief that this word came from Latin.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/349393/dictionar... quotes the OED as:

> The ordinary Middle English and early modern English form was iland, yland. ... In 15th cent. the first part of the word began to be associated with the synonymous ile, yle (of French origin), and sometimes analytically written ile-land; and when ile was spelt isle, iland erroneously followed it as isle-land, island; the latter spelling became established as the current form before 1700.

Or the spelling. I mean, I know how the letters are pronounced, so I can see that fåtölj is actually a good transcription, but visually it bears no resemblance whatsoever with fauteuil.

I have found that French words that ended up in English were actually quite difficult to recognise in a conversation, even though they are written exactly as in French most of the time.

I guess it’s related to the great vowel shift (but not only, even consonants are weird), but English really is weird compared to a lot of continental European languages. For example, a /r/ sounds like a /r/ in anything from Spanish to Finnish. Granted, there are differences in prononciation, but it is still not distorted beyond recognition. Nothing that comes close to the utterly bizarre prononciation of the /r/ in /iron/.

http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/future.htm comments that the future tense "is a very difficult aspect of English grammar", with several different forms:

- auxiliary verb will for predictions/statements of fact ("The sun will rise at 6.30 tomorrow")

- auxiliary verb going to for intentions ("We're going to buy a new car next month.")

- present continuous for arrangements; arrangement = a plan for the future that you have already thought about and discussed with someone else. ("I'm meeting my mother at the airport tomorrow")

- present simple for scheduled events ("The train departs in 10 minutes.")

That's in addition to the future continuous ("Don't call me after 10 o'clock. I'll be sleeping." and future perfect ("I hope my mother will have finished cooking dinner by the time I get home.")

Your Cartesian doesn't include negatives, where English uses the auxiliary verb do. (Compare "I do not know Spanish." with "I know not Spanish".)