Subj : Confusion!! To : Ardith Hinton From : alexander koryagin Date : Sat Jan 08 2022 20:14:01 Hi, Ardith Hinton! I read your message from 06.01.2022 23:56 Happy New Year! DH>> We speak of a brother and also of brethren... [etc.]. ak>> For English learners it should be something more ak>> positive.;-) AH> Understood. Okay... in general, and on a more AH> serious note: 1) My native tongue has simplified AH> various other inflections which caused a lot of grief when I AH> was trying to learn French & German. 2) If one AH> has a dictionary which explains the etymology, i.e. from whom we AH> borrowed the word, it's easier to understand spellings like "yacht" AH> & "caught". In short, we borrowed them from different languages. AH> And once you know words like "scribe" in English, you can make sense of AH> headers written by people from Europe who've forgotten to change their AH> language toggle.... :-)) It is also a big question what percent of all English words is known to all the people speaking English. ;) So, when speaking English, maybe it is a good idea to simplify phrases and don't use old fashion words. Bye, Ardith! Alexander Koryagin fido.english_tutor 2022 --- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0 * Origin: Usenet Network (2:5075/128.130) .