If we were to reform our spelling, we would lose much meaning. How would you differentiate between sight, site, cite, and cyte?
Well said. English is an exceptionally powerful language because we're not sticklers on where words come from, or their history, or some silly list of rules of how things "should" be done. If we find a word that better describes something than what we had available to us, we take it and make it our own.
Witness the French obsession with their language. You see, they have nothing left. We have bigger horizons.
"It's a pretty poor writer who only knows one way to spell a word." -- Mark Twain
Witness the French obsession with their language.
I have to chuckle every time the Academie Française pops up with something silly like "un ordinateur" instead of the term everyone was already using, "un PC." Even the French tend to tune out, light a Galoise, and say "Quoi?"
Not to mention that they have an amazingly silly system for cardinal numbers 70 and up. The system used by French-speaking Swiss is much more sensible.
We've imported one word from Malay -- but it has two correct spellings, and is always combined with the English verb "to run."
Foreigners often conclude that English is an easy language to learn, since we have NO rules of grammar! (actually, we have them, but they're in1visible. The hardest word for a non-native speaker to master is -- the.