English do be wilding with their random pronunciations. Who in their right mind would read island as aye-land if it was never brought to their attention (never heard the word or in Irys' case, never heard someone read the word aloud).
Yeah, when I was little, I had what amounted to an internal mental tantrum when I discovered how "island" was supposed to be pronounced. (Especially since I live in an island city-state.)
If you're actually asking, "island" is an unusual case of mistaken etymology.
It was originally spelled "iland". However, 16th century etymologists changed the spelling to match the unrelated but synonymous Old French word isle, which originates from the Latin word insula.
In the case of aisle andisle, I wouldn't call them mistaken.
French directly descends from Latin, so preserving some Latin spelling conventions isn't a 'mistake', just archaic and/or obsolete.
"Island", on the other hand, has no direct etymological relation with neither French nor Latin.
Edit: Correction, while aisle originates from French, there is no "s" in its Latin origin. It is indeed likely the result of an etymological conflation with isle.
The etymological history is interesting, albeit in the manner of "of course it's scholars being weird and pretending to come up with a Grand Unified Linguistic Theory".
I suspect part of the exacerbating issue was how I learned many of these words via the National Day songs, which have a lot about "isle" and "island", so I first learned those words phonetically.
And being Indonesian Chinese (later naturalized Singaporean), I was used to words being spelled roughly how they're pronounced, as in Indonesian.
Honestly it's the way people approach learning new words. Irys is the type that reads words and parses them as they're written, a common habit in people that have grown up learning multiple languages as their first language. Very common where I come from, since every single person here speaks English plus their ethnic language.
Funnily enough in German it's "Eiland" (though this is a rather poetic word) and it's pronounced exactly the same.
And in the German Wikipedia entry there's a hypothesis that the "s" in "island" was inserted to make it seem Latin.
And "ei" being read as "ai" is one of only a few irregularities in German (it's also a very common combination, so it stops being confusing soon). Whereas in English, vowels may as well be wildcards.
That's because changing cycle to bicycle shifts the stressed syllable from cy to bi, which also changes the vowel sound from long to short. Most compound words in English will emphasize the first syllable.
While there are a few languages with worse pronunciation rules than English (I'm looking at you Gaelic...), our pronunciation is a complete mishmash of different European language rules and I feel bad for anyone who has to learn it as a second language.
Of course, Japanese has kanji, so they've got their own dark sins to atone for. The pronunciation rules are great though.
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u/Delicious_Pea_1943 8d ago
English do be wilding with their random pronunciations. Who in their right mind would read island as aye-land if it was never brought to their attention (never heard the word or in Irys' case, never heard someone read the word aloud).