Much has been made of the non-intuitive symbol-to-sound correspondence in English -- you've probably seen the old quip that "learning English spelling is rough, but it can be taught through tough, thorough thought, though." There are two main reasons for the often weird pronunciation rules (and multiple exceptions) in English. First, there's a general rule of thumb that the older a language's writing system is, the more time it's had to diverge from pronunciation. (Put a different way, pronunciation tends to shift faster than written language does.) Second, English is an amalgam of Germanic/Old English and Romance/Norman French, each of which had its own (different) pronunciation rules, with borrow-words added in from just about every culture English-speakers have contacted.
Honestly, though, for a strange writing-to-pronunciation correspondence, I don't think any language in the world can beat Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In what sensible system would the feminine name Caoimhe be pronounced "kwee-va?"
Now, don't get me wrong, I think Irish and Scottish Gaelic are both gorgeous languages. I just look at the written forms and think, "I can't even make a guess at how that's pronounced."
Of course, there's no problem that arose naturally and organically that humans can't make worse out of sheer cussedness. Deliberate misspellings in (for example) business names make me wonder how any child grows up knowing how to spell correctly. Near my village there used to be a children's dance studio -- now long out of business -- called, I shit you not, "The Shug'r-n-Spyce Skool of Dance."
And I'm with Dave Barry, who said that any business tacking an extra "e" onto the end of words to make them look old and quaint should be taxed at a higher rate. ("Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe.")
We add another layer of weirdness when there are ill-advised attempts to meld English with non-English alphabets. There's a whole thing called "faux Cyrillic," where Cyrillic letters are thrown in to give something a pseudo-Russian flavor. Just look at the header on the game Tetris -- it's almost always written "TETЯIS." The problem is, "Я" isn't pronounced /r/, it's pronounced /ya/, so the game spelled this way would be "Tetyais."
Then, there's this sign in front of a Greek restaurant that I saw while visiting family in Santa Fe, New Mexico:
"Ooh, my favorite! Grssk Rthtphsssrphs!"
Throw into the mix the recent development of "Textspeak" -- lmfao and brb and ttyl are so commonly used that they don't even flag as misspellings -- and you have the makings of a confused mess. These sorts of conventions aren't only created to speed up communication, however; they can also be used to hide -- like "Leet," an online spelling convention originating in the late 1980s to allow hackers to communicate with each other on message boards without alerting the moderators by using forbidden keywords. (An example of Leet is that "elite hacker" is written "31337 H4XØR" -- the first word using 3, 1, and 7 for the letters E, L, and T, respectively, so the first word is "eleet.")
It's always a struggle to stay one step ahead of bad actors, and there are scammers who have used this kind of technique to get people to respond to scam emails (or click on their websites), by substituting one similar, but non-English, character in a legitimate-looking website address. "Citibank.com," for example, might turn into "Citibɑnk.com" -- substituting the IPA symbol "ɑ" for the standard "a" -- and unless you were looking closely, you might well not notice the difference, and click your way to a website that is definitely not the real Citibank.
So what we end up with is a mishmash of problems that arose from a combination of the vagaries of language evolution and deliberate attempts to mess things up further, along with a good measure of pure idiocy:
As Julius Caesar so famously said, "Vspph, vphdph, vphcph."
In the above case, there's also an apparent disregard of what my tattoo artist said to me -- "Be sure it's what you want, because that shit's permanent."
So that's this morning's musings on some weird features of written language. Understand that I'm not one of those types who rails at every alteration from the King's English -- I'm about as far from a prescriptivist as you can get. I can't help but wonder, though, if some of what's happened has actually made it more difficult to be understood.
Of course, if you're a ЯUSSIAИ 31337 H4XØR, that's probably exactly what you wanted.
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