Hunt wrote: ↑I have sympathy. I'm an atrocious speller myself. I don't know what I'd do without the red underscore. The more I've written on the internet and had to pay attention to spelling, the more words like 'seperate' just "look" wrong to me, and I know that it's an a. Words like 'snidness' are easier to suss out since without the e the i seems like a short i, a rule that can be applied generally, but not universally (in English anyway). English is actually quite diabolical to people with bad spelling. The moment you think you've got it down, an exception pops up.
There's a reason for that, namely that English spelling has a very long and complex history.
Modern English spelling was developed around 1350 AD, but it was never codified, and it was often subjected to variations between speakers of Anglo-Saxon and of Anglo-Norman ancestry. Basically every writer used its own idiosyncratic spelling. After the invention of printing things got even worse. Most printers of the most widely available books (like the Bible) were not native English speakers, and modified the spelling according to the conventions of their language (usually Dutch).
Further attempts to improve things were done by the literate elite, who often tried more to make English words look like as if they were derived from Latin and Greek origins. Have you asked yourself with the "b" in debt or doubt are silent? That's because they were introduced by scholars who thought that debt came
directly from Latin "debitum" and doubt
directly from the Latin "dubitare", when actually they came from ancient French "dette" and "doute", where the origin Latin "b" had already been lost.
Also the Great Vowel Shift that happened between the 14th and the 19th century changed pronunciation heavily, so for example "name", which is now pronounced /neɪm/ (rhymes with "claim"), in Geoffrey Chaucer's times was pronounced /namɪ/(rhymes with "tsunami"), so in Chaucer's times the spelling "name" made much sense.
Other languages, like French, Italian, or German, were codified with a precise and phonologically consistent (one sound, one letter) spelling in relatively recent times, usually due to political efforts, to get a uniform spelling of the "standard" language. English is a highly anarchic language where everything goes and the choices of spelling are usually made because of matters of literary or academic prestige or simply of the force of habit.