Comment on To distinguish between the word woman and women, we change the A to an E, but only change the pronunciation on the O.

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some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Looks like it’s time to recommend one of my favorite books:

Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme―And Other Oddities of the English Language

I found it via an interview with the author on the 99% Invisible podcast:

Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse

It’s a great book because it lays out, very logically, all the ways our language went to shit. It was a product of the Great Vowel Shift and crappy timing regarding it, plus competing cultures ruling the lands in England.

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