Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Why French sounds so unlike other Romance languages" video.

@toaritok more like we pretend it Doesn't make sense because no one can be arsed to find a way to actually mark stress, among other things. Once you realise that English Digraphs are functionally their own characters (also, there are actually more of them than are usually acknowledged) and that the rules for how you read a character at the start of a syllable and at the end of a syllable are different, it becomes a lot more consistent. Even more so once you realise that written English is standardized to two main forms (with a couple of minor regional variants thereof) while pronunciation has, at Minimum, one per country if you only include "standard" dialects, but actually at least hundreds of variations.... Basically, English spelling is taught to native English speakers in an utterly nonsensical way. This isn't terribly surprising, as getting a computer to read it out correctly requires approximately 63 rules, as well as indicating which dialect you're going for and where the syllable breaks are. The stress patterns too, if you want it to get them right consistently. Note that English Used to use a diacritic (oater replaces by a hyphen to make it easier to type on typewriters) to disambiguate between a vowel on each side of a syllable break with no consonants in between and a digraph that happened to use the same characters, but has never marked the difference between s-h and sh- or - sh Point is, you have to simplify it in order to start teaching kids young enough that they get enough vocabulary down soon enough, but that means too young to really get the hows and whys of it.... But then this is never corrected even as they get older!
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