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Vowels, and the Alphabet
One of the things I marvel at is that Spanish and Japanese get away with five vowels. Maybe a few dipthongs for Spanish. But English has at least 12 semantically distinct vowels:
bait, bat; beet, bet; bite, bit; boat, bought; boot, but; plus bout. Boit is not a word but seems like it could be, for a total of 12. There's also butte, but arguably that has an extra consonant /byoot/.
The other thing is how many syllables English has; it's a good thing we have an alphabet, and not the more commonly invented syllabary. The syllabaries I know of are in the 40-60 range. English: 12 vowels, plus 18 useful consonantal letters, plus th (thin), th (then), ch, and sh. 22*12 = 264 CV syllables. And that's not counting all of the consonantal combinations which don't deserve their own alphabetic letter: sk, br, gl, gr, -nt, -ng, kl, kr, etc., etc. It'd be a nightmare!
bait, bat; beet, bet; bite, bit; boat, bought; boot, but; plus bout. Boit is not a word but seems like it could be, for a total of 12. There's also butte, but arguably that has an extra consonant /byoot/.
The other thing is how many syllables English has; it's a good thing we have an alphabet, and not the more commonly invented syllabary. The syllabaries I know of are in the 40-60 range. English: 12 vowels, plus 18 useful consonantal letters, plus th (thin), th (then), ch, and sh. 22*12 = 264 CV syllables. And that's not counting all of the consonantal combinations which don't deserve their own alphabetic letter: sk, br, gl, gr, -nt, -ng, kl, kr, etc., etc. It'd be a nightmare!