I've just spent the past month editing an almost 300 page novel. At times, English confuses me with all the grammar, spelling, punctuation rules and exceptions. I tried to be consistent, but I still found issues even after submission.
I learned that blond is for male and blonde is for female. I didn't know English has spellings due to gender. I know Spanish has masculine and feminine nouns. I also just found out that German has three gender categories, masculine, feminine, and neuter. At least English is better in this category!
English also has that "I before E except after C" rule. I don't think it should be a rule, since it obviously is broken.
There are fun punctuation basics that include comma placement. Anyone want to eat Grandma? You know, "let's eat Grandma" vs. let's eat, Grandma."
I still get hung up on italics vs. underline. Part of that is from when I used a typewriter and mailed submissions. It is much easier now with email or online submission forms.
Not only are some words spelled the same, but some are pronounced the same and have different meanings. Write, right, rite. Baseball bat, animal bat. Do a search for homographs, homophones and homonyms to find more examples.
Speaking English is not a breeze either. There are silent letters and words that are spelt the same but pronounced differently, words that should rhyme, but don't.
I work in healthcare. Try pronouncing disease or drug names. At least, some drug names I can pronounce correctly due to commercials. Anything to sell product, I guess... I caught my husband humming a medication commercial. Some of their advertising is quite catchy!
English also borrows words from other languages, so English is not just English!
I even found a poem that was written to show the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. It is a very long poem called "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité. If you are interested in reading it, here is the link -https://www.spellingsociety.org/uploaded_misc/poems-chaos-misc.pdf
It concludes with the suggestion to give up!
Happy editing!
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