“Namely, English spelling is hideous in large part because it represents what English was like before the Great Vowel Shift happened. That neatly demonstrates that vowels really are as liquid as I am presenting, and that what happens to them can neither be said to “ruin” the language nor be dismissed as bubblegum static, since no one wishes we could go back to talking the way Chaucer did. Here’s what I mean. Why would any sane person write mate and pronounce it “mayt”? We’re used to being taught that this is a “long” a and that the “silent” e is our clue to that. But clearly no one would design a system this way. If people in France and Spain and seemingly everywhere else on earth were writing the “ay” sound as e, what was the sense of instead bringing in an a and signaling that it, instead of e, is pronounced “ay,” and by putting a “silent” e at the end of the word? Why e? Or why use any sound at all as standing for absence instead of, duh, not writing anything there? While understanding that customs differ across the ages, we can be quite sure no writerly caste decided on such nonsense as a writing system. Sure, some eccentric medieval scribe could have arbitrarily decided on such a system, but why on earth would it have been accepted across England? When something makes that little sense, usually it was created amid conditions now past in which they did make sense. And indeed, time was that mate was actually pronounced the way one would expect: MAH-tay. The final -ay, unaccented, wore off over time just as the -ther in brother has worn off among men saluting each other such that guys of a certain demographic call each other “bruh” and one might call one’s sister “sis”—that’s easy. “Mahtay” became “maht.” But why don’t we just say “maht” today? Because likely the vowel moved, and this one did.”