English is the most adaptable language in the world. England got colonised something like seven different times up until the mediaeval age. The language that came out of the end of that process is precision designed to accommodate unfamiliar words and grammar. There's no better language to put a loanword into. And it's really easy to invent new grammar for English, which is why English has the most neopronouns.
English has sacrificed its logic and structure to grow fluidity.
Nobody's stopping you using "whelmed". You can just start using it whenever the opportunity arises.
I use it occasionally, though normally not seriously, along with words where you have an "un" or "dis', but no positive equivalent, e.g. "gusting" as a positive "disgusting"
The way I learned it, is that people have a tendency to emphasize, so when became overwhelmed. You see the same thing with 'good', 'great', and 'epic'meaning the same thing within certain contexts.
If you want to get technical, I believe "whelm" originally came from waves hitting the hull of a ship, overwhelmed was when the waves crashed over the side and onto the deck.
'Jam' can mean a fruit preserve, to play music, a stuck door, traffic, to cram something into something else, a tense situation, or to block a radio signal. All spelled and pronounced the same.
As an Asian, "Midwest" always feels off. Only now I realized this is the same shit as "Middle East" (which I forgot to give second thoughts as an adult). Now both terms really sucks to me!
It's a pretty quick read and it explains exactly how the English language became such a mess. For each thing that doesn't make sense, it provides a reason that explains it. Short version: the timing of the Great Vowel Shift relative to the invention of the printing press really screwed it over. There's quite a bit more (Norman invasion in particular), but that was what codified all the badness.
Learning the "why" of so many previously preposterous language and spelling rules was gratifying and enlightening. They're still preposterous but slightly less maddening now.
There's also an excellent podcast interview with the author on 99% Invisible. Check it out. It made me buy the book and I definitely recommend it every time a post like this comes up.
IMO, the more important reason is that English is crusty af. Lots of languages had massive changes since the printing press was invented, but that didn't stop them from changing their orthography. Germany even had an official spelling reform in the 1990s.
Note: Changed my mind but preserved initial reaction:
No. Read the book. Other languages had their massive shifts before or after the printing press. English evolved at roughly the same time. That caused chaos. While other languages solidified in advance, and others solidified after, the english language was evolving at the same time that rules were written. It's a perfect disaster (those who know, know. great song. great album).
Not direct support for my argument, just context:
The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations.
Back to commenter (so it doesn't look like I'm joining different quotes):
Germany even had an official spelling reform in the 1990s.
I've never heard of this, so maybe I'm wrong / uninformed. I'll look into it because I truly believe that language shapes thought and this is interesting to me.
The German orthography reform of 1996 (Reform der deutschen Rechtschreibung von 1996) was a change to German spelling and punctuation that was intended to simplify German orthography, thereby making it easier to learn,[1] without substantially changing the rules familiar to users of the language.
Wow. That's so incredible and impossible where I live (USA) that I'm dumbstruck at the pragmatism of it. I was wrong. Fuck England and the USA (as always!).
What's worse is that even in languages with common ancestry, the gendered pronouns are not necessarily the same - the same thing can be male or female across a border.
::: spoiler well, i knew what a pike was
worst part was i played DnD, i knew exactly what he was asking. i just saw a low hanging fruit and an opportunity to be a smartass and you really can't set me up like that.
:::
As someone who speaks 3 languages, I can confirm english is a weak ass language.
It's strong point is that daily and normal speech and formal writing or speech are almost the same.
Thats not the case with most languages, specially the older and more complex ones.
I kind of like how it’s ever changing and evolving, I know that sours some people’s pickles but I think it’s neat. I like how it incorporates and is built on so many other languages. I enjoyed reading a short story posted here a while ago that progressively walked backwards in time as a language and it was really neat to me. I’m an idiot though so most other languages probably do this also.
American English has never be bashful about filing the serial numbers off a word and then claiming it as our own. It can lead, (lead/lead/led?) to confusion even among us native speakers. At least until we sort it out.
Personally I blame the French, (for no reason other than I can), for all the ills in the English language.
That's the indication of a healthy and alive language.
English has the most speakers and is the scientific and professional language of the world currently. So it is the most up to date and alive one currently.
While german is hard and weird, but it's not far harder than english.
I used to know german but never used it and lost the muscle.
I speak Persian(Farsi), Arabic and English.
I tried to learn Japanese and Chinese (mandarin) for a while but I just gave up.
I'm glad we're not speaking Mandarin as our common language. It's one of the least interesting languages and objectively the hardest languages I've seen. At least Japanese has it's beauties, but I couldn't find them in Mandarin.
I don't think anything comes as close to showcasing the extend of this pronunciation ridiculousness as the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité which is said to contain about 800 examples.
It's got a silent letter at the beginning, and then a silent o in the middle, and an invisible a, which you pronounce but don't type, and then a silent c, before going back to some sort of sanity for the last three letters. Who decided that's how it should be spelt?
We already had the word Terra so why did they have to go spell this version Ptero
No ironically it has far more to do with being colonized than colonizing, although when you go that far back the distinction between terms like English, Norman, or Anglo-Saxon get a little fuzzy.
so the fun thing about the history of the english language is -
writing got standardised just around the same time the printing press was invented, since everyone now had access to the same resources more people learnt to read and write in a similar way. and all was well :)
...
and then something that linguists call "the great vowel shift" happened. where vowels of the oral english language just kinda, did a flip. but because of the printing press thing, you couldn't just update the ortography... and now because of that (and many other things too, but this is a significant one) english is the way it is :)
Whoah, I went down the rabbit hole after googling this "great vowel shift" and damn if it isn't insanely interesting! English should have naturally split into descendant languages but the arrival of the printing press in the middle of the transition messed things up royally and now the entire world has to bear the idiosyncrasies. Nothing short of amazing, thanks a lot for your reply!
German and French aren't scripts, they are languages that use the same script as English - Latin. And LOL if you think they are any better than English.
By more sensible scripts I mean Hebrew or Arabic, which are a lot more efficient and clear in packing words than Latin or Cyrillic.
Posts like this are so ignorant because they're based on the false premise that English was made to be the global language, when it's not. It was made as a result of the mixing of Germans, Scandinavians, Celts, and French people on a gloomy isolated island in the corner of Europe for thousands of years. It's a language that was evolved by those people, and thus it contains a lot of their linguistic quirks coming together.
Every single language has quirks like this. For example, I also speak Arabic, and people are always shocked when I tell them that an Arabic speaker from Iraq and an Arab speaker from Morocco cannot understand each other because Arabic dialects are basically different languages. THey're only unified by standard Arabic, which most Arabic speakers don't use in their day to day lives. It's basically a language that's only used to communicate with other Arabs.
English only got to where it is because of a unique situation in history where the language was used by not one, but two global hegemons. Not only that but those hegemons happened to be the most of the powerful in history, and they ruled back to back. That's what spread and cemented English into the global language it is today.
You didn't address a single thing from the original post.
It was highlighting how English is a very quirky language. You can explain it, obviously there are reasons why, but it doesn't change the factual observation that English is a uniquely inconsistent language.
Most languages have some sort of academic body that dictates the correct usage of the language, and occasionally push for adjustments that resolve these inconsistencies. English does not, it's a crowd sourced effort with the results being what we see today.
Many countries and languages share similar backgrounds to English - invasion by foreign peoples, large migrations, etc - yet they've settled most of their background into a consistent ruleset - there's always exceptions and irregularities, but not to the level of English.
One of the largest sources of inconsistencies was the "Great Vowel Shift", along with the invention of the printing press at roughly the same time, which standardized a spelling that didn't reflect the massive ongoing changes in pronunciation.
This is a fascinating topic, but accusing others of ignorance for pointing out something that is a fact, is in itself ignorance.
This is complete nonsense. All languages are organic and evolve naturally. There's no academic body that controls any langauge, that's not how languages work. What exists is institutional bodies that try to break down and explain languages into rules and patterns, they don't actually dictate the direction of the language. English also has such institutions by the way. This idea that English is uniquely inconsistent or uncontrolled is not true. Arabic, for example, is just as quirky, inconsistent, and uncontrolled. That's just human speech.
You're just elaborating and expanding on a part of what I said, while being an abrasive jerk, and ignoring everything else that didn't suit your argument.
To the point in question, I never said academies invent the future of a language, only that they gatekeep the rules, which can include pushback against popular usage (the french academy is notorious for being very against english neologisms).
There have been cases where the changes are very substantial, like the Portuguese and French changes that happened (coincidentally) in 1990, for example, that push the languages in certain directions.
Take a cup of tea and relax a bit, and try not to argue the voices in your head.
Edit: I missed this point, let me address it:
All languages are organic and evolve naturally.
Have you heard of Esperanto, for example, or the concept of auxiliary languages?
What about artistic or fictional languages, like Tolkien's Elvish or Star Trek's Klingon or Dothraki or High Valerian from Game of Thrones?
None of them are "organic", and as for evolving, it really depends but a language like Esperanto, assuming it is regularly used by a community, is very unlikely to differ from it's textbook definition because it was specifically crafted to avoid the inconsistencies that we're discussing and that arise from evolution.
I still don't understand though why Europe so many languages, a good chunk of it was in the Roman empire so you would have thought that they would all have a single unified language as a result of that but even in the Mediterranean there's different languages.
I mean all the romance languages descend from Latin. The reason why that language splintered into a bunch of other languages is isolation. When Christianity came to Europe, the empire splintered into a bunch of smaller empires and kingdoms and stayed that way for centuries. That led to a lot local variations that eventually turned into full blown languages.
English can certainly be difficult! It can understood through tough thorough thought though throughout the learning process.
If y'all ain't get the gist of it y'ain't thunk it thru enuff.
This was the easiest sentence to parse out for me...
I'm a fan of the phrase "before was was was, was was is""
I'd guess this sentence would be just as flashy in any language really, not just in english
No. It's shit
He said in English.
Do you speak other languages tho?
Yeah lol
English is the most adaptable language in the world. England got colonised something like seven different times up until the mediaeval age. The language that came out of the end of that process is precision designed to accommodate unfamiliar words and grammar. There's no better language to put a loanword into. And it's really easy to invent new grammar for English, which is why English has the most neopronouns.
English has sacrificed its logic and structure to grow fluidity.
Reading that gave me a tough hiccough.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
A real English sentence.
Yeah I never understood that one myself
Unless I'm missing something it's supposed to be Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Bison from the city of Buffalo bully other bison from the city of Buffalo.
Buffalonian bison [who] Buffalonian bison bully [also] bully Buffalonian bison. Eight is correct!
Ah got it, thanks!
Dang!
past tense read and toxic lead vs reading and leading if somebody doesn’t underntand
Careful, though: reading (past tense of 'to read') doesn't rhyme with Reading (place name)
And leading (being in front) doesn’t rhyme with leading (the metal on a roof).
I feel like I walked on a rake after a perfect catwalk reading you. Love it.
Lol I did get it immediately after, but my instant thought was wait, read and lead don't rhyme?
Adultery is not the opposite of infantry; whimsy is not an adjective; you can live together in an apartment; and the Midwest is in the Eastern US.
"flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing
What a country!
"Inflammable means flammable, what a country! "
Dr. Nick
Edit added end of quote
Bye, everybody! *dies*
Why can I be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not perfectly adequately whelmed?
Nobody's stopping you using "whelmed". You can just start using it whenever the opportunity arises.
I use it occasionally, though normally not seriously, along with words where you have an "un" or "dis', but no positive equivalent, e.g. "gusting" as a positive "disgusting"
English lacks a "gusting" word, but romance languages don't.
e.g. in Italian "gustoso" is the opposite of "disgustoso"
That's a brilliant fact, and perfect example if anyone disagrees with me, thank you :)
lol I love "gusting." Next time I eat someone else's cooking, I'm throwing that out there.
Whelm and overwhelm are synonyms.
The way I learned it, is that people have a tendency to emphasize, so when became overwhelmed. You see the same thing with 'good', 'great', and 'epic'meaning the same thing within certain contexts.
If you want to get technical, I believe "whelm" originally came from waves hitting the hull of a ship, overwhelmed was when the waves crashed over the side and onto the deck.
'Jam' can mean a fruit preserve, to play music, a stuck door, traffic, to cram something into something else, a tense situation, or to block a radio signal. All spelled and pronounced the same.
Also door jambs
Jim should shim the jamb.
Just wait until you learn about 'set.'
That actually makes sense because it's from the point of view of Europe.
Just as middle east and western Asia are the same region
As an Asian, "Midwest" always feels off. Only now I realized this is the same shit as "Middle East" (which I forgot to give second thoughts as an adult). Now both terms really sucks to me!
It is from the POV of the original colonies.
This explains some of my US geography confusion over the years...
Midwest is not a place, it is a People.
Qu'est-ce que c'est ?
That's the ubiquitous "what's that" in French. All languages are evil to newcomers.
You're welcome.
In German, "jemanden umfahren" means drive around someone,
while "jemanden umfahren" means run someone over.
That’s an artificial sentence. We never drive around people
In Italian we also have a similar phrase: "Cos'è che è?"
Luckily, it's only in spoken language because it's considered a bit "wrong".
But what the fuck is that, bro?
I would like to recommend Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language.
It's a pretty quick read and it explains exactly how the English language became such a mess. For each thing that doesn't make sense, it provides a reason that explains it. Short version: the timing of the Great Vowel Shift relative to the invention of the printing press really screwed it over. There's quite a bit more (Norman invasion in particular), but that was what codified all the badness.
Learning the "why" of so many previously preposterous language and spelling rules was gratifying and enlightening. They're still preposterous but slightly less maddening now.
There's also an excellent podcast interview with the author on 99% Invisible. Check it out. It made me buy the book and I definitely recommend it every time a post like this comes up.
IMO, the more important reason is that English is crusty af. Lots of languages had massive changes since the printing press was invented, but that didn't stop them from changing their orthography. Germany even had an official spelling reform in the 1990s.
Note: Changed my mind but preserved initial reaction:
No. Read the book. Other languages had their massive shifts before or after the printing press. English evolved at roughly the same time. That caused chaos. While other languages solidified in advance, and others solidified after, the english language was evolving at the same time that rules were written. It's a perfect disaster (those who know, know. great song. great album).
Not direct support for my argument, just context:
Back to commenter (so it doesn't look like I'm joining different quotes):
I've never heard of this, so maybe I'm wrong / uninformed.
I'll look into it because I truly believe that language shapes thought and this is interesting to me.Wow. That's so incredible and impossible where I live (USA) that I'm dumbstruck at the pragmatism of it. I was wrong. Fuck England and the USA (as always!).
"German orthography reform of 1996"[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996
Those three are even all from the old vocabulary, they all have German cognates: zäh, durch, Teig
At least English doesn’t have a “she” table, a “he” refrigerator, and a “neutral” lamp gender for everything.
First of all tables are male, and secondly at least we spell things close to how they are pronounced in german
In Italian tables are gender fluid. You can have "la tavola" e "il tavolo".
Surfing? It's a female: la tavola da surf.
Eating? Male: il tavolo.
Table as a metonymy for eating: la tavola (WTF?!)
What's worse is that even in languages with common ancestry, the gendered pronouns are not necessarily the same - the same thing can be male or female across a border.
Hes policemanning
I was going to say it's different because police officers are people, but they're not.
Maybe start with the fact that not all words in use in English are English words.
Or that people in different parts of the world say/spell words differently and we inconsistently applied it:
Kernel and Colonel were the same rank but we took the pronunciation of the first and the spelling of the latter.
English-language spelling reform now.
But let's only do it in some English speaking countries and not others! I am joking, but this is one of the reasons why American English has diverged from British English.
Relevant xkcd:
Speling Reeforma
What? Speak English.
Say 'what' again! I dare you!
It's phunny how fotographs phunction in filosofy.
There is nothing more useless than ph.
until youre being eaten alive by acid
This is also funny.
Phuck ophph
🤣😂
read deed redemption, the farm flipper spinoff.
reed deed redemption: a game about the ownership of a plant
Como enemigo número uno del Inglés, this post feels validating to me.
Time de inimigos do inglês
Base and bass (sound the same) and bass (sounds different)
Foundation
Instrument /deep sound
A Fish
How anyone learns English is beyond me
"You said you were a great bass player!"
Me struggling to hold onto a huge wet slippery fish "Grimmie a second, geez!"
That's actually spelled 'ghoti'.
i still remember the best joke i told my entire time in college. a professor was talking about turnpikes and asked if anyone knew what a pike was, with a specific answer in mind..
::: spoiler well, i knew what a pike was
worst part was i played DnD, i knew exactly what he was asking. i just saw a low hanging fruit and an opportunity to be a smartass and you really can't set me up like that. :::
As someone who speaks 3 languages, I can confirm english is a weak ass language.
It's strong point is that daily and normal speech and formal writing or speech are almost the same. Thats not the case with most languages, specially the older and more complex ones.
I kind of like how it’s ever changing and evolving, I know that sours some people’s pickles but I think it’s neat. I like how it incorporates and is built on so many other languages. I enjoyed reading a short story posted here a while ago that progressively walked backwards in time as a language and it was really neat to me. I’m an idiot though so most other languages probably do this also.
American English has never be bashful about filing the serial numbers off a word and then claiming it as our own. It can lead, (lead/lead/led?) to confusion even among us native speakers. At least until we sort it out.
Personally I blame the French, (for no reason other than I can), for all the ills in the English language.
That's the indication of a healthy and alive language.
English has the most speakers and is the scientific and professional language of the world currently. So it is the most up to date and alive one currently.
Do u happen to speak german? I’m studying it rn and it’s making me very grateful we live in an English speaking world :/
While german is hard and weird, but it's not far harder than english.
I used to know german but never used it and lost the muscle.
I speak Persian(Farsi), Arabic and English. I tried to learn Japanese and Chinese (mandarin) for a while but I just gave up.
I'm glad we're not speaking Mandarin as our common language. It's one of the least interesting languages and objectively the hardest languages I've seen. At least Japanese has it's beauties, but I couldn't find them in Mandarin.
My daughter is filled with laughter
And you can't spell manslaughter without laughter
My brain got fired while reading this. 🗿
In a way I think these things are what make English a beautiful and poetic language
To call any language shit immediately discredits any opinion on it you might have
It is in the end parts of old englsih, French, Latin, Dutch, German and Norse duct-taped together and forced into a trenchcoat.
I don't think anything comes as close to showcasing the extend of this pronunciation ridiculousness as the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité which is said to contain about 800 examples.
English is a bastard offspring of a four way language orgy.
I genuinely read that as ba-se-lin-e
do u mean
bejslajnorbaseliin?the 2nd one, but "base" has two syllables.
thats what i mean, thats not a "but"
not like the word "base" which is pronounced
bejsWait... how do you pronounce vaseline?
/ˈvæ.sə.lin/
Va-seh-leen
I pronounce vaseline vase-line just to be consistent with baseline.
You pronounce it like: “petroleum jelly rots the latex within 30 seconds”.
like the vase with a linen.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
PONY AND FUCKING BOLOGNA!!
So? Eminem makes all the words in the English language rhyme so balance is restored in the world
I've always found it funny how single vowels are pronounced in English, e.g. when you say the alphabet.
Any other language:
English:
Letters in English are pronounced differently from their phonetics, oddly enough
It's not just English. Afrikaans: Ah, 'ere, ee, <the diphthong in "whip">, <not present in any English words>
This is why I had a problem with "phonics" as a teaching philosophy.
You have "ph" sometimes teaming up to cosplay as a freaking "f". And that's one of the easier rules. It's all broken from the get-go.
My favourite word is pterodactyl
It's got a silent letter at the beginning, and then a silent o in the middle, and an invisible a, which you pronounce but don't type, and then a silent c, before going back to some sort of sanity for the last three letters. Who decided that's how it should be spelt?
We already had the word Terra so why did they have to go spell this version Ptero
comb bomb tomb tome come
only two of these rhyme.
vaseline sounds like it should have been spelled vasilene but the i and the e got switched as a funny prank and it stuck.
All languages are beautiful
I hate this language so much.
England has been invaded and conquered 4 times (?). The language is a mess of leftover words and crammer.
Celts Romans Angle Saxons (Jutes) Vikings Normans
https://martinpollins.com/2024/04/03/the-waves-of-invaders-who-shaped-britain/
the main problem with english is that they invented printing first, and then had massive changes in vowel pronunciations lmao
The printing press was invented in Germany
ah you're correct yes. i meant when they got to use the press, not invented it
Would good food nude be lewd?
This entire thread is /c/badlinguistics.
Eh, not as bad as it usually gets.
Great podcast.
https://waywordradio.org/
I’ve seen this before, this time I chose to make the statements false by rhyming and not rhyming where appropriately or inappropriately acceptable.
I don’t know why I did this, maybe just for fun being silly.
Stanard Reply to this: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Past tense lead (as in a horse to water) is led, though
Dunno if oblivious but it's
Lead (metal) and to lead (a horse)
I had just woken from a nap before commenting, brain dumb
Hey dw I’m dumb long before and after a nap
Well, one is a compound noun and the other is a trademark that became a common word.
...it's because of all the colonising and stealing of words.
No ironically it has far more to do with being colonized than colonizing, although when you go that far back the distinction between terms like English, Norman, or Anglo-Saxon get a little fuzzy.
Why didn't they steal something to replace read and lead?
It's mostly the orthography being horrifically out of date and not being designed well
Bāslyn Vaselín
Use the International Phonetic Alphabet.
/rɛːd/, /riːd/
/ˈlɛd/, /ˈlɛd/
Or make everyone switch to a language that is orthographically transparent, like Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish.
English has no rules, we should all revel in the chaos rather than having our language be stringently defined.
It is weird how this kind of writing won out in Europe when it literally had exposure from all sides to far better more sensible scripts.
so the fun thing about the history of the english language is -
writing got standardised just around the same time the printing press was invented, since everyone now had access to the same resources more people learnt to read and write in a similar way. and all was well :)
...
and then something that linguists call "the great vowel shift" happened. where vowels of the oral english language just kinda, did a flip. but because of the printing press thing, you couldn't just update the ortography... and now because of that (and many other things too, but this is a significant one) english is the way it is :)
Whoah, I went down the rabbit hole after googling this "great vowel shift" and damn if it isn't insanely interesting! English should have naturally split into descendant languages but the arrival of the printing press in the middle of the transition messed things up royally and now the entire world has to bear the idiosyncrasies. Nothing short of amazing, thanks a lot for your reply!
More sensible scripts like german or french? English is the only language that can't spell coherently, nothing to do with the script.
You could easily always use the same letters for the same sounds. Maybe it'd be vuhselihn then
German and French aren't scripts, they are languages that use the same script as English - Latin. And LOL if you think they are any better than English.
By more sensible scripts I mean Hebrew or Arabic, which are a lot more efficient and clear in packing words than Latin or Cyrillic.
All the good will that I had had had had no effect on my disdain for this language
Posts like this are so ignorant because they're based on the false premise that English was made to be the global language, when it's not. It was made as a result of the mixing of Germans, Scandinavians, Celts, and French people on a gloomy isolated island in the corner of Europe for thousands of years. It's a language that was evolved by those people, and thus it contains a lot of their linguistic quirks coming together.
Every single language has quirks like this. For example, I also speak Arabic, and people are always shocked when I tell them that an Arabic speaker from Iraq and an Arab speaker from Morocco cannot understand each other because Arabic dialects are basically different languages. THey're only unified by standard Arabic, which most Arabic speakers don't use in their day to day lives. It's basically a language that's only used to communicate with other Arabs.
English only got to where it is because of a unique situation in history where the language was used by not one, but two global hegemons. Not only that but those hegemons happened to be the most of the powerful in history, and they ruled back to back. That's what spread and cemented English into the global language it is today.
You didn't address a single thing from the original post.
It was highlighting how English is a very quirky language. You can explain it, obviously there are reasons why, but it doesn't change the factual observation that English is a uniquely inconsistent language.
Most languages have some sort of academic body that dictates the correct usage of the language, and occasionally push for adjustments that resolve these inconsistencies. English does not, it's a crowd sourced effort with the results being what we see today.
Many countries and languages share similar backgrounds to English - invasion by foreign peoples, large migrations, etc - yet they've settled most of their background into a consistent ruleset - there's always exceptions and irregularities, but not to the level of English.
One of the largest sources of inconsistencies was the "Great Vowel Shift", along with the invention of the printing press at roughly the same time, which standardized a spelling that didn't reflect the massive ongoing changes in pronunciation.
This is a fascinating topic, but accusing others of ignorance for pointing out something that is a fact, is in itself ignorance.
This is complete nonsense. All languages are organic and evolve naturally. There's no academic body that controls any langauge, that's not how languages work. What exists is institutional bodies that try to break down and explain languages into rules and patterns, they don't actually dictate the direction of the language. English also has such institutions by the way. This idea that English is uniquely inconsistent or uncontrolled is not true. Arabic, for example, is just as quirky, inconsistent, and uncontrolled. That's just human speech.
You're just elaborating and expanding on a part of what I said, while being an abrasive jerk, and ignoring everything else that didn't suit your argument.
To the point in question, I never said academies invent the future of a language, only that they gatekeep the rules, which can include pushback against popular usage (the french academy is notorious for being very against english neologisms).
There have been cases where the changes are very substantial, like the Portuguese and French changes that happened (coincidentally) in 1990, for example, that push the languages in certain directions.
Take a cup of tea and relax a bit, and try not to argue the voices in your head.
Edit: I missed this point, let me address it:
Have you heard of Esperanto, for example, or the concept of auxiliary languages?
What about artistic or fictional languages, like Tolkien's Elvish or Star Trek's Klingon or Dothraki or High Valerian from Game of Thrones?
None of them are "organic", and as for evolving, it really depends but a language like Esperanto, assuming it is regularly used by a community, is very unlikely to differ from it's textbook definition because it was specifically crafted to avoid the inconsistencies that we're discussing and that arise from evolution.
I still don't understand though why Europe so many languages, a good chunk of it was in the Roman empire so you would have thought that they would all have a single unified language as a result of that but even in the Mediterranean there's different languages.
I mean all the romance languages descend from Latin. The reason why that language splintered into a bunch of other languages is isolation. When Christianity came to Europe, the empire splintered into a bunch of smaller empires and kingdoms and stayed that way for centuries. That led to a lot local variations that eventually turned into full blown languages.