While this article has surprisingly little of it, there&#x27;s still some bæd linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic, spoken on a remote island by (today!) merely 300,000 people, with the language of England, which was invaded from every which way every couple of centuries until the 1400s. That&#x27;s just ridiculous. To take a <i>much</i> more adequate example: To most Germans, the Nibelungenlied in its original rendition is just about as understandable as Beowulf is to modern English speakers.<p>English <i>is</i> in dire need of a spelling reform (the Celts have you one-upped here, Scottish and Irish have had very successful reforms,) but I don&#x27;t think it is &quot;weirder&quot; than many other languages of peoples that have had widespread linguistic contact to other societies. French, German, Spanish, all have their oddities, on a similar scale of magnitude as English.