Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "A guide to our alphabet" video.
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@berryesseen ... For reference, the V and W sounds are so imediately and obviously different to speakers of most English dialects that the inability to make the distinction was traditionally seen as a speech imediment (or an overly pretentious affectation, depending on what was going on in the upper classes at the time), if less so than people who were unable to distinguish R from W.
For added bonus points, W is decidedly non-standard in how one forms the sound. Phonetically it doesn't actually even fit on the consonant table properly, because the table has 'how is the airflow obstructed' on one axis and 'how far back, forward in the mouth is the airflow obstructed' on the other... and W (and a very small subset of globally MUCH rarer other sounds) is formed by obstructing the airflow in two places at once. Neither of which are the same point at which it is obstructed to form a V.
V is the voiced form of F. F and W sounds have nothing in common, and the only thing that V and W have in common (voicing, that is, vibrating the vocal cords) they also share with B,D,G,Z,J, and several others.
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@nolongerlistless English only actually has one pair of words where the difference between voiced and unvoiced th makes any difference: "thigh and thy". And the latter of the two is an archaic second person possessive pronoun that no one actually uses except for humour value or to sound 'fancy' (which tends to backfire as it's almost never used correctly) or when quoting the bible or Shakespere... and even then only certain, old, translations of the bible.
And at this point Shakespere is basically incomprehensible to most people without translation anyway, far too many of the words have long since fallen out of use, just to start with.
In all other contexts, while using the wrong reading of TH will make you sound odd, it's still perfectly comprehensible and causes no confusion... Exactly the same as L, which English also actually has two sounds for (which way you pronunce it is dictated by where it is in the word), but it doesn't even have an equivalent to the thy/thigh contrast, so no one ever considers that relevant... except speakers of other langues that either only use one L sound consistently or actually DO contrast the two sounds, to whom that particular quirk showing up when someone is speaking their langauge is a pretty big sign that the speaker's native langauge is English.
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Q and K are actually not formed the same way in the mouth, due to the W (written U) after the Q... but the sounds come out so similar that the distinction is a bit pointless.
G making a J sound: blame the french.
X: yeah, there's really no good reason for keeping this one other than how much of a pain changing it would be, because it's always read 'eks'... except when it's xy, in which case the combination reads 'zi'.
The C, on the other hand, is actually both more reasonable and more of a mess than most people think.
using SC instead of SS where SS is expected happens because SS is sometimes ZZ (I have no idea why it is not just Written as ZZ in those situations, mostly because I've put zero effort into finding out), so SC is used when you want to be completely clear that you want an S sound and not a Z sound. (supposedly there's also a third reading for SS, but I never remember what that's all about).
CK replacing most, but not all, instances where one would expect CC or KK is just annoying. There's really no good reason for CK to replace KK other than people being confused about what they're supposed to do, and CC in the middle of a word becoming CK ... I think it's because sometimes you're supposed to pronunce the two Cs seperately, but sometimes it seems to be because someone didn't like the look of sticking a K in the middle of that word. And word final CK is because you're not allowed to end words in C... except when the character immediately before the C is an I, so an extra K gets bolted on the end.
And then, of course, any word ending in 'IC' that is then going to take the suffix "LY" for some reason I don't entirely understand doesn't take "LY" but instead "ALLY"... which of course lead to people deciding (entirely reasonably in light of the other rules/patterns) that the base word ending not in IC (after all, word final C is not permitted) but in ICAL, and taking the standard LY suffix. ... but of course, they only did that with Unfamiliar words. So the words everyone used all the time didn't have that happen, but the ones that were new to a lot of people (even if they became common Later) did have that happen.
If you want something really infuriating, try figuring out the rules for V. It's like if the rules for C were less complicated, but made even less sense. And the only justification for any of it is that in looped cursive script, lower case W and lower case VV are too hard to tell apart. ... except in loose cursive script any string of characters without an ascender, decender, cross piece, or dot on it (and some that should have those but don't because looped cursive is unreasaonable nonsense in its own right) ends up looking like vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv (or rrrrrrr) no matter what you do so I have no idea why they bothered. (There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand ditched it in favour of linked Italics with personal flourishes... I forget when exactly. My grandmother writes in looped cursive, my mother does not (I think she Might be able to, not sure?) but can read it, I can neither write nor read looped cursive. But linked italics is basically as quick to write, and if you can read printed or carved text you can read linked italics (unless the person who wrote it had Particularly bad handwriting) rather than having to learn what amounts to an Entire Additional Character Set!)
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@lakrids-pibe It's interesting to note that the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written Q (when the word isn't a foreign borrowing that has not yet been fully anglicised) is not actually the same as the way one holds one's mouth to form the sound written K. ... largely because the former is always followed by a 'w' sound (written U) while the latter is not (except when someone is playing games and spelling it kw precisely because that's not how it is usually written). English actually forms 'r' sounds several different ways due to similar issues, and has two very different pronunciations of 'l', with which one you get being dicatated by where it is in a word (and thus its interaction with other sounds), with the latter example making for quite a distinct English accent in languages that only have one l pronunciation, or have both but as distinct sounds that can actualy form minimal pairs and are made on purposes rather than just as an incidental result of surrounding sounds.
C is absolutely a confusing mess, but it doesn't need to be.
CH is fairly obviously it's own thing.
The k sound is K, there's really no good reason to write that with a C.
The "rule" about word final C is a bit messy. IC is permitted, but otherwise it must become CK or CE, depending. And of course there's a lot of situations where you should get KK by the standard rules and get CK instead as well, and CE introduces confusion where it looks like the E should modify any vowel before the C but it just... doesn't. Except when it does. (oh, and as an added bonus, most words that ended in IC but took an ALLY suffix where other words would take an LY suffix have changed over time to instead end in ICAL and take the standard LY suffix).
SC is a bit interesting. This isn't C being weird so much as it is S being weird and C being incidentally caught in the crossfire. Because S can be read as a 'z' sound, and particularly because SS can be read as if it were ZZ (and the fact that that's a Thing is a pain in the butt in its own right), SC is used to indicate 'no, I actually mean the 's' sound, but a double letter is required here'. I also vaguely recall something about there technically being a third 's' sound to go with unvoiced s and voiced z, and that also influences which way it's written, but I can't for the life of me remember how any of that works.
Mind you, where C is confusing, V is just Dumb.
First off: Can't end words in V, ever. So any word that Should be written ending in V, is instead written either with F, so words which actually end in the 'f' sound must be written with word final FF. Or, if that is not done, the word must instead end in VE. This is a silent E, just by the by. You'd think that would cause confusion regarding the reading of the preceeding vowel, except nope, V always counts as two characters for vowel interactions, despite being written with one character and the W, nominally a double V, only count as one... TH (digraph, not across a syllable boundary) also only counts as one character for vowel interactions, mind you.
C's confusing weirdness, you can at least see the reasons why it's weird, it's not hard to track back and go, 'ok, yeah, I hate the result but I can see why it was done that way'.
V is just inexcusable nonsense. The only justification for any of it is that bad handwriting/poor typefaces make VV and W too similar (well, I suppose in looped cursive vv and w are hard to tell apart... but then again, even written entirely correctly, looped cursive writing basically looks like vvvvvvvvv or rrrrrr with the occasional acender, decender, dot, cross piece, or capital letter Anyway (seriously, so many of the letter forms have Nothing in common with any other way those charactes are depicted), so that wouldn't make it any Worse. ... There's a Reason Australia and New Zealand straight up abandoned looped cursive in favour of linked italics decades before the (English speaking) world apparently just gave up on proper handwriting in general in favour of typing everything (and given that kids are apparently taught on ipads these days, not even doing That properly): In linked Italics you can actually tell what the letters are.)
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Turns out using an ortholinier key layout(? arrangement? not sure on the term there. It's not which value is asigned to which key, it's where the keys themselves are physically located relative to each other), putting much less strain on your fingers, and a fully split keyboard (because 'ergonomic' keyboards that Aren't fully split aren't actually all that ergonomic, just less bad than the straight ones), putting much less straing on your back, shoulders, and wrists, makes dramatically more difference on that front.
Dvorak somewhat reduces how often you're doing the thing that strains your weaker fingers. A better shaped keyboard just removes all the issues that cause unnecessary strain in the first place. Admittedly, they also tend to be programable, mechanical keyboards, so they can be Dvorak as well if you like. The downside, of course, is that they're not the mass produced standard, and are consequently Expensive.
Also, by all metrics other than phsyical strain, the gains from using Dvorak (or any other layout for the alphanumerical keys) rather than Qwerty are so small that they're pretty much entirely overwhelmed by the losses from having to retrain... so if picking which one to learn in the first place, Dvorak is probably a bit better (aside from the fact that you'll almost never encounter any keyboard set up that way outside of enthusiasts) than Qwerty, but if you learned Qwerty there's no real benefit to switching.
That said, there's a Lot of benefit to be had from reasigning various other keys based on what you actually use your keyboard for the most (people using certain programing langauges all the time get quite a bit of benefit out of having the Esc key where Tab is normally located, for example).
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