Okay, AN UPDATE: Mondays suck. (That's not the update. We all know that Mondays suck.) That being said, I'm switching the Monday and Wednesday schedule proposed in Friday's post.
The new proposed schedule is Monday's Rant, Wednesday's Books, and Friday's Books And Sometimes Other Things. This is partially because I may need to reread TFIOS to review it properly, and also because, as you can see from the title, ENGLISH IS STRANGE.
This is inspired by my homework, as so often is the case. We're still early on (this is only the second day of class, technically). We're doing phonetics for basic practice, because Old English is not the same as modern English, so we need to read the phonetic alphabet. Don't know what this is? Go find a dictionary. Look up a word. Any word. Look just past the bold THIS IS A WORD text; there are probably some grey letters, a few dots, apostrophe-like things where there shouldn't be, maybe an upside down 'e' or something that looks like a theta or a an 'a' and an 'e' smooshed together. That's what we're doing.
In doing this, I have realized just how weird English is. There are two ways to write 'th,' for example: that and thin. 'Y' is counted as a consonant, and it's written like a 'j' in the phonetic alphabet. The written language has 'g' when you're supposed to phonetically write 'j,' except it's not a 'j,' because if you transcribe 'j' someone will say the word with a 'y.'
AND THIS IS SO COOL. I just don't understand why we do these things. WHY is 'y' transcribed as a 'j?' More importantly, WHY does English have two ways to say some consonants?
Check back in six weeks to see if I find out.
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