Mad Dogs and Englishmen

via http://ift.tt/2cCLz5B:
illuminice:

if anyone ever tells you that english isn’t ridiculous remember that the reason why we have a silent b in debt is because a group of guys got together to standardise english spelling and got to the word debt, which at the time was primarily spelled either ‘dett’ or ‘det’. so they basically went:

‘everyone speaks latin, right? so let’s put a silent b in debt. like debitum, which is latin for debt. problem solved.’

also the reason why there is a h in ghost is because when the printing press first came to england the only people trained to operate it were flemmish speaking, and they put a h after g because that’s what you do in flemmish. they put shit like ghirl and ghoose, but the only reason why ghost stuck is because people saw ‘the holy ghost’ in the bible and were like ‘well, that MUST be right’.

so yeah english is a really stupid language with some of the most ridiculous spelling

It gets weirder. Why were the people operating the printing press Flemish? Because they weren’t printing any old printing, press, there were printing the first bibles in English. Something that was spectacularly illegal and got both books and people burnt on a regular basis.

So frankly you can criticise their spelling when you’ve run a clandestine freedom bible press under threat of the British Inquisition.