[GtrsRGr8]

The answer to your pronunciation (and here's another question: why is the verb spelled "pronounce," but the noun drops the second "o," making it "pronunciation"?) questions is that English is a mongrel language, much like the people of the British Island are (and Americans are much, much more so)? The Island was invaded by a bunch of different ethnic groups like, let's see . . . the Celts, the Angles, the Saxons, the French (Normans), et al. Oh, and there is the group of uninvited guests that you may have heard of called the Romans, speaking their Latin . . . . We've even picked up at least one thing from the Mongols of east Asia, with whom we've historically had very little contact--the "ith" ending of a few English words!

It is that mixture of languages, which went into creating modern English, that creates the irregularity in spelling, different formation of verb tenses, different ways of creating the plural, etc. I genuinely pity the person for whom English is not their native language, and they have to learn it! And, although I am very glad for it, English has become the lingua franca of the world. It would make much better sense to use, for example, French (see paragraph below). In fact, as recently as when I went to high school, French was probably about as close to an international language as any, and my father encouraged me to chose French to take in high school, rather than Spanish, German, and maybe one other language that we had an option of taking, for that very reason).

I've studied French and Greek. Both of them are what I'll call "clean" languages. With few exceptions, the spellings are regular, the tenses of verbs are created the same way each time, etc. It's almost easy to learn them (Greek less so than French, but you've got an almost completely different alphabet to deal with there, for one thing). But neither France nor Greece had much in the way of foreign immigration or occupation over, say, the last two thousand five hundred years or so (when the Roman empire invaded, and occupied what is called Greece today, they basically just largely added the entire Greek language to their culture, making many people across the empire both Latin and Greek speakers and/or writers).

Lesson over. Time to go to your next class. ha