The best way i heared it is English waits in dark corridors to beat up other languages then rummages through their pockets for words and grammar.
But also for the writing blame the Dutch for why it is so bad. Many languages go through a great vowel shift ours just happened at the time the Dutch came over with printing presses. So the printing presses standardise writing, yet this is happening at the same time how it is all said is changing and then applied through how the Dutch would do it. I know the gh combination is affected by this but there are some others as well.
English also received its word order (SVO) from the vikings. Old English and Frisian used SOV, but then the vikings conquered the northern part of England for 300 years. They called the area "The Danelaw" because that's where the Danes lived, and the languages mixed.
Yeah that mixing is one of the reasons we got rid of cases I think? Basically tried to make things simpler because so many people were mixing. I loved studying Anglo Saxon literature, it's a difficult language but I think it just looks beautiful. They had too many words for 'the' lol.
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u/dayburner 1d ago
That's because colonel is a french word, the real issue is English doesn't know how to properly borrow words.