AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Most of the examples up here are due to gradual accent shifts after spellings were established. For example, "love" and "prove" used to rhyme. "Hour" didn't always sound like "our".

language is stupid. I don't bother with it

Don't you write?

Pruhv it.

Chinese is like that. My understanding of it is the a word's meaning changes with the tone.

Several English words do that, too.

Edit: Urgh, Skype keeps disconnecting me and not letting me receive messages from people.

I sprained my leg when I woke up from my nap today because I tried moving quickly when I was stretching. This is super uncomfortable, but it does give me more of a reason to stay in bed.

We all need more reasons to never get up.

I read that as never give up, and got really inspired for a moment thinking "YEAH THIS LEG WON'T GET THE BEST OF ME" but then I reread it and became lazy again.

I went from "Oh dear, I misworded something?!" to "I'm a wonderful person!" to "Eh, I could be worse."

Airra, Sailor Moon has the same issue with word recall and difficulty thinking of words to describe things, and she came up with a decent fix (at least when it comes to talking online)

She's one of the few people I know who regularly uses an online thesaurus. Any time she has a tough time describing something, or wants a better word, she goes immediately to it! It helps her out a lot, and I think it's a tool that a lot of people forget about after elementary/high school. Maybe give that a try when you're talking online?

all of my stories are strictly composed of gestures and grunting

I always forget those things exists.

It wouldn't help too well offline when doing verbal communications, but I try to make as many attempts to get out of such encounters that it probably wouldn't matter that I don't have one then.

Oh snap, we had a language discussion while I was gone. I love Linguistics so much.

A lot of the things people quibble over English for doing are done in other languages, too. Every language has homophones; in French vin and vingt (wine and twenty) sound the same. (French is really the only foreign language I know well enough for examples.)

English has weird spelling, but only because we have lots of loanwords and we typically retain the spelling of the language they come from. This is actually useful because it can help us guess the meaning of unfamiliar words if we have some familiarity with other languages. Some people have called for phonetic spelling reform (where all words are written to match how they sound) but we would A) lose that information and B) accents and whatnot mean that it would be pretty difficult to establish a uniform pronunciation baseline. English has 26 letters but way more than 26 sounds; we'd need a new alphabet as well. Even then, it would just change over time anyway, and we'd be back to where we started.

Also Americans spell stuff differently because Noah Webster actually did that spelling reform, at least on a small scale. He championed taking out the u from -our words (colour/color), spelling -re words with -er (centre/center), and -ize with a z rather than s (specialise/specialize) because they were actually being pronounced that way. Cuh-ler, not Cuh-loor; Sen-ter, not Sen-truh; etc. And then the rest of the English-speaking world hated that idea and laughs at us all the time.

tldr; English is weird but no more weird than any other language.

On the whole pronunciation thing, I completely forgot that some words do do that (I'm not very intelligent), but yeah, I was thinking about Chinese, Laotian, and other langauges where the bulk of it is made up of that. Where one word can mean 2-7 different things depending on how you say it.

In English, yeah, pronunciation is pretty important, but the emphasis and what kind of emphasis on syllables don't matter as much other than not making words sound weird. I wasn't really thinking of where words have different phoenic sounds all together like "ee" or "eh" sounds, just different emphasis on each letter. The way I'm thinking of it, I can't really demonstrate through computer. My mom's native language (Laotian) has the word "mah" which, depending on the stesses, can mean dog, more, come here, or here. They all sound the same, just slightly deeper, or slightly higher. There also might be more meanings, but I don't know Laotian that well. Whoops.