• wjrii@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Sure it is. English just has multiple generations of “phonetic” that overlay, and are not consistent with, one another. It has, if you will, codebases that were forked, re-forked, and then occasionally merged back in after developing on their own for a few centuries, and no official steering committee was ever established. There is semi-official documentation, usually from self-appointed pedants, but even that adjusts as more features are merged in willy-nilly and workarounds emerge.

    English spelling is hard not because it lacks any logic, but because this entire language is a case study in modularity and extensibility at all costs.