Silent letters, multiple possible sounds per letter, counterintuitive letter combinations…why is English spelling so damn weird?
David Crystal, author of linguistic history Spell It Out, explains the numerous and conflicting forces that, both intentionally and not, warped our orthography. Just one of many fascinating anecdotes:
…Flemish typesetters didn’t know English well, so spelled some words in a Flemish way. That’s where the h in ghost comes from. It was gost in Middle English. They put it into goose too—ghoose—but for some reason this didn’t catch on.
