If you’re not a native English speaker, learning English can seem a tough challenge. There are so many rules that end up not being rules at all (“i before e except after c” springs to mind – we’ll come back to that later!). Sometimes certain spellings seem to make no sense at all! One thing’s for sure: English is full of oddities that don’t make sense.
It was enough to annoy playwright George Bernard Shaw so much that he actually left money in his Will to pay for the creation of a new alphabet. This new alphabet came out in the early 1960s, but sadly never caught on!
We’ll give you a few examples so you can see what we mean.
The contranym conundrum
English has a fair share of contranyms. A contranym is a word that has two opposite or contradictory meanings. The word “buckle” is one of our favourites – it means to hold together but also to fall apart. “Splice” is another – it means to join and to separate! The context in which these words are used becomes vital for being able to understand which meaning is intended.
Muddling through meaning
It’s not just that words have opposite meanings, they can also have multiple meanings. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary has 192 definitions for the word “set.” Author Richard Lederer points out in his book Crazy English just how confusing the English language can be to those for whom it isn’t their native language. In his book he asks “How is it that your nose can run and your feet can smell?” Very good question! And why does a slim chance and a fat chance mean the same thing?
There’s also a strange anomaly with putting “in” as a prefix. Normally it makes the word take on the opposite meaning to the original word, like when “visible” becomes “invisible”. However when something is “flammable” it’s easy to burn and if it’s “inflammable” then it’s also easy to set on fire.
The woes of Old English handwriting
Some of the anomalies in the way we spell words in English comes down to sloppy handwriting and how things changed in the use of Old English. Back in medieval times, English was written in a highly stylised manner like this 
It could look very confusing, especially once the ink had smudged! In many cases the writing of “in,” “ni,” “m,” “iii,” “ui,” and “iu” could all end up looking exactly the same because the lines were so thin and could end up merging or fading away. People began to find it all very confusing and started to change the spelling of words to make it less so. One simple change that was made was to replace using the letter “u” in words with “o”. This is why certain words that have the phonetic sound “u” when spoken, are now spelled with an “o”. Think of words like “son” or “monkey” and you’ll see what we mean. It’s also the reason why many words end in “ck” rather than just “k”. Adding the “c” into the spelling made it clearer what sound should be used in the spelling. Words like “pick” and “stick” are good examples of this.
Pronunciation predicaments
How words are pronounced can also cause a great deal of confusion for those learning English. The same word can be spelled exactly the same but pronounced in a completely different way: “The doctor wound the bandage around the wound”.
It’s possible to pronounce the 4 letters “ough” in eight different ways! This sentence contains the pronunciation of all 8 of them “A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.
And then there are some odd goings on with how plurals are assigned – if the plural of “mouse” is “mice” then why isn’t the plural of “house”.. “hice!”
Speculations over spelling
Despite there being some rules around spelling, there always seem to be anomalies which mean they’re not rules at all! Here’s where the “i before e except after c” rule comes in. It sounds simple enough, but there are a whole raft of exceptions to the rule. Words like “”neighbour”, “weird”, “abseil” and “caffeine” are all good examples and there are thousands more. So much for the rule!
To see more strange English anomalies, take a look at our previous blog “How English can be confusing to those for whom it isn’t their mother tongue” and “English pronunciation. Mastering the meaning”.