If you are a native English speaker, you know your language is pretty weird. I remember realizing this when I learned how to spell neighbor. Foreigners learning the language know only to well how weird it is. Oddities in spelling and pronunciation happen a lot in the English language. Like tough and though sounding different. Or how you can wind up a ball and throw it into the wind. And I can object to that object.
Did you know we order our adjectives in a specific way? And we don’t even have to think about it! How does this sound: Tiny delicious round four cookies sat on the table. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? I’ll try again: Four delicious tiny round cookies sat on the table. Ah! So much better. We always order our adjectives by quantity, value/opinion, size, temperature, age, shape, color, origin, and material.
In 1934, a Webster dictionary was published with a made up word, "dord." It wasn't until 1939 that somebody caught it! Words with no meaning show up in the dictionary all the time due to publishing errors. They're known as "ghost words."
Majorly weird things happen with spelling so we're the only ones that have Spelling Bee's. As a Spelling Bee champ, I found it strange that other countries don't participate in such things. Why? Well, their words don't have such random and difficult spellings, in other words, the spelling actually coordinates with the pronunciation of the word. What a thought!
There are no languages that are closely related to English. You can learn Spanish or French (or any romance language) and be able to understand quite a bit in Italian. But there isn't a language related like that to English.
A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours. As in, every 120 minutes somebody is making up a new and viable word. Editors with the job of finding these new words peruse publications and find new words, new usages of old words, different spellings and so on. When one of these is found they mark it and the surrounding context. English is changing constantly, with new strange spellings and more words for us to spell and pronounce.
