Whenever I see this word, my mental voice says ‘kway’. Why is it pronounced ‘key’? Words should be spelled the way they are pronounced, and words should be pronounced the way they are spelled. English is complexed enough as it is, why make it more complex than necessary? Language is a medium of communication, so it should be only as complex as necessary to convey ideas. It can have some extra features like synonyms because they help distinguish subtle differences in meaning and allow alternatives for creative expression, but features like arbitrary pronounciation rules add no value to a language.
If you designed a language today with a goal of efficiency in mind, I wonder what it would be like. Mathematics is an efficient language, but it’s a language for logic, not natural expression. In fact, it’s a horrible language for natural expression. It needs more ambiguity. A little bit of ambiguity is good in a language because it allows you to be creative, make puns, double entendres, and metaphors. Theres little room for that in mathematics.
An efficient natural language should allow anyone to express what they are feeling, their ideas, a set of instructions, an argument, and any form of verbal communication as easily as possible, but it needs to be flexible enough for a poet, a novelist, and any creative linguist to create verbal art like ones we have today, or better yet, allow poems to be even easier to write. Imagine a language that makes writing palindromes easy? Or a language where all words ends with similar sounds which make rhyming easy. What about a language where the accent on a vowel convey an emotion?
There are countless interesting features this language could have, the trick is finding a set of features that work well together. Whatever language features it has, let’s not have spelling “exceptions” that make English such a horrible second language to learn. When you are spending more time learning about spelling exceptions and silent letters than learning to communicate with that language, there’s something wrong. If you’re not a native speaker who grew up with these arbitrary rules, you’ll notice them. If you speak another language such as Spanish where pronounciation is almost never a problem, you’ll notice.
This is one of my pet peeves, unfortunately, there’s little I can do about it, but it does make me want to learn more languages!
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