Is English just badly pronounced French [video]:
Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him.
Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see the note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc", meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah" in English) is just a vowel shift.
French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French was really the result of every day people not treating it like a dead language to be preserved.
“How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks)”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ
I learned a lot from this and continue to find words that these lessons apply to.
If so it is equally badly spelled German.
In foreign lands did wielder welt.
The script upon the scabbard belt
Thereupon became misspelt.
(E.g.compare ship, schip, Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
Bukt or gulf are the words mostly use for major bays, but bukt in particular can also be used for very short, narrow inlets, while fjords are used for some of our largest bays.
The Oslo fjord for example, is quite broad and open for most of its length. Most of the smaller bays in the fjord are bukter, but the largest, longest of them are also named fjords.
It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine.
As with many others posting here IANALinguist.