Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The invention that broke English spelling" video.

@Myrtlecrack Noah Webster's entire Thing was "Not British"... It was nationalist propaganda, in essence. The British following along would have defeated the point. The real problem is arguably that even in American english his reforms only partially stuck, and not in any consistent manner, so rather than bringing the spelling more into line with the pronunciation (of a certain dialect that it would have then drifted away from again by now), and thus easier, all it acctually did was make it Less Consistent, and thus more difficult.
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English orthography is pretty far up the list when it comes to difficult writing systems to learn, fairly close to Japanese, though beaten out by a few languages in southern Asia that are somehow substantially worse.
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@richatlarge462 con-TRIB-u-ting con-tri-BUT-ing, or something like that, I think. My brain processes it roughly that way, at least.
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@denverbraughler3948 Some of it is pronunciation shifts, some of it is questionably chosen spelling, some of it is having more than one standard of spelling (technically there's more than two, but most of the extras are just 'one or two words a divergent from standard Commonwealth English for various reasons'. The biggest thing though, is that English spelling is a bit inconsistent, but nothing like as inconsistent as it Looks, because mostly it's just unreasonably Complicated, and the logic of that complicated system is badly taught, making it seem less consistent. (that and it depends on you somehow magically knowning where the primary stress in a word is without actually marking that in any recognizable manner, for some godforsaken reason).
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@Brian3989 And yet in many ways the difference between them and regular grammar is quite consistent.
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