We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes. ...
I'm pretty sure we had that in our English book (one of the Green Line series).
some are pronounced the same way, but there are 4 different pronunciations for the same four letters.
And there are several sets of letters which sound the same:
two - too
brake - break
And other letters which aren't pronounced for some stupid reason, as in: lis(t)en, (k)now,...
And then there are the letters not written but pronounced:
(y)uniform, n(y)ew (okay, it shoud be a yod...)
And the vowels - none of them are pronounced the way they are written, and the same combination can be pronounced in so many different ways... This is certainly different in French, Italian, Spanish and German - at least as far as I can tell.
It steals wholeheartedly the words, the concepts, the grammar it needs to express concepts from the cultures it's dealing with, and makes the concepts its own as well.
I don't agree here. English certainly doesn't steal much in the way of grammar - it doesn't have much of it in the first place. At least not if you compare it to German or Latin.
Oh, and then there are those (whole!) words which can be pronounced in several different ways - like the word 'foyer'. I know of three different pronounciations - and I'm not even native!
Oh, and last but not least:
There was this little girl with a lock on her forehead.
If she was good, she was really, really good, but if she was bad, she was horrid.
I mean, 'forehead' can be pronounced as in fore-head, but also as a rhyme to 'horrid'. How strange is that?
