[ELI5] Why have some languages like Spanish kept the pronunciation of the written language so that it can still be read phonetically, while spoken English deviated so much from the original spelling?
In: Culture
English did not originally have fixed spelling. People would spell words however they thought it sounded. This means that spelling varied from person to person and region to region. Also, due to being made of bits of several languages all smushed together often retaining parts of the original language’s rules, there’s no consistency as to how words are pronounced or where you even get the spelling from. A man named Samuel Johnson eventually wrote a dictionary in which he spelled the words however he wanted to and because of how popular it became, that became the fixed spelling. Johson liked stuffy fancy spellings rather than simple phonetic ones and he set the idea of telling people the “correct” way to write instead of telling them how words were normally used. Webster eventually did something similar for American English, although he preferred simplified spellings, hence some of the differences between American and British spelling.
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