Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Germany's Worst Defeat: Operation Bagration | Animated History" video.

  1.  @blackarrow1259  thing is, in English? "-tion" is a four character unit indicating a specific sound, (the one in "operation". Usually said roughly like "shon". No idea why), so if you're trying to spell something phonetically, without resorting to IPA notation, you need a different letter sequence to indicate... Not that. Fortunately, "y" is a semi-vowel to start with, and in non-sylable initial positions, the character is mostly used to indicate "this is an i or e sound of some description, but, due to some combination of tradition and the way spelling conventions interact, writing it as such would screw up the reading of rest of the word" English spelling suffers from having about twice as many sounds as it does characters, with most of the excess being vowels, an intense hatred of diacritics, and undergoing one of the most significant recorded vowel shifts pretty much Immediately* after it codified and locked down the bulk of its orthography (which was already a bit messy due to many of the standards being dictated by Dutch (rather than native English) printers needing to keep lines of text justified (that is, all the same length) as much as by the actual sounds being represented. Dutch and English are similar enough that this Worked, but it's sometimes a bit odd.) *As such things go. In practice it happened in fits and starts and waves over the course of a century or two.
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