English developed from the Germanic language family, which means it shares many features with other Germaic languages like Dutch, German, and Swedish. It has changed a lot in the last 1000 years. Old English, the stage of English where it first began to be written with the Latin alphabet, was very different. To see what it was like, here is a short description of Old English.

For a long time after the Norman invasion of 1066, when French speakers took over, English was no longer written, though it was spoken. When it started being put into writing again, the language had changed so much that the old writing tradition no longer applied. The written form was unstandardized and took a long time to become standardized (what is language standardization?)

The arrival of the printing press in English had a huge effect on the spread of literacy and the development of a writing standards, but the timing was a little inconvenient and resulted in a lot of the spelling oddities we have in English today (read here for more about the role of the timing of the printing press). One of the things that made the timing inconvenient was a complete reorganization of the sound system, known as the Great Vowel Shift.

Many things about English seem to be illogical and not follow any rules. Why are they like this? The answer is usually in the history of the language. The explanation for many more weird things about English can be found in the book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme—and Other Oddities of the English Language. 

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