okay I gotta mute the lieutenant poll or I'm gonna be yelling about loanwords all day with every bit of angst in my shrivelled english teacher's heart but just so you know it's definitely lef-

look, I don't make the rules

actually, that's 99% of the problem, the people who *did* make the rules all disagreed with each other and were wildly inconsistent

can you force a germanic language into latin grammar? turns out you cannot, but scribes at the time took more of a "not with that attitude" approach and here we are

I love english so much (I mean, I love languages generally but I loved teaching english) because the way it has evolved over the centuries is so interesting and you can learn so much about anglophone history by learning about the way they use/used words

one of my favourites: the reason we use french-derived words for cooked meats but old english-derived words for the animals they come from is that people who ate meat were mostly aristocratic norman french-speakers but the people who *farmed* it were english-speaking serfs

that's why a cow is a cow, not a vache, but cooked cow is beef, from bœuf! a pig is a pig, not a cochon, but the meat is pork, from...well, porc.

there is so much class history in language and usage and honestly I'm not mad at people who say "loo-tenant" because the fact that the pronunciation has evolved in some places but not others is another example of how the way people speak can tell you a lot about them

the american drive to remove "unnecessary" vowels from words like colour and oestrogen is another cool example - the oe comes from ancient greek and the ou from old french (modern french uses eu in most of those words now!) but if you don't pronounce the silent letters...

though in some accents, you do still pronounce them! for example, if you say ee-strogen rather than e-strogen, you *are* pronouncing the o!

anyway, language is beautiful and bizarre and everyone's accent or dialect is a good accent or dialect because accents and dialects contain within them the history of a group of people and that's fuckin rad