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Malbin’s the maos livable ciddy n the world (we keep broibin the Economist tuh sigh that), an that’s the wigh we loik it. Tüü roight! We love the pahks, we love the fooddy, we’re all füüdies n coffee snobs, an we’re praodly multikulchrul. Even bogans av picked up on the café kulcha down ere. Yeahr it gets muggy sometoimes an the weathuh cn get  derro, bud a leas’ it’s not Synney—or Gawd elp me, Brizzie! An we daon tawk funny, loik the Poms Oi seen wroitin ere. Mite, zat wot youse cawl the Queen’s English?

(God forgive me, I really am supposed to know better than that.)

Cutting to the chase:

The default answer is that English words are spelled differently because they used to be pronounced differently, just before English spelling was fixed in aspic with the invention of printing (inconveniently timed to partway through the Great English Vowel Shift).

In Late Middle English, there was [ðeːɹ], which is not a million miles away from its current pronunciation; but their was [ðæiɹ]. (Or at least, that’s what squinting at Middle English phonology for ten minutes tells me.) <ei> in their was written as a diphthong, because it used to be a diphthong, all the way back to Old Norse þeirra. And <e> in there was written as a long vowel (through the final <e>) because it used to be a long vowel, all the way back to Old English thǣr.

In Early Modern English, diphthongs did all sorts of crazy things, one of which was to have some instances of <ei> sound the same as long <e>. (And some others sound like <ei>, and some others sound like <ai>.) So there and their accidentally ended up sounding the same.

If the two words had happened to have ended up sounding the same before, rather than after, spelling was standardised, they likely would have been spelled the same. That’s unless the ambiguity was so intolerable that one of them would end up changing into a different word anyway; but languages are remarkably tolerant of homophony.

For example, Old English has a verb lætan meaning “permit”, and a verb lettan meaning “prevent”. They ended up sounding the same at a time when English spelling was reset (no continuity between Old and Middle English spelling). And in fact let in Middle English did mean both “permit” and “prevent”; it was only more recently that the “prevent” meaning of let (as in “without let or hindrance”) became obsolete.

It takes a Norman Invasion or an Atatürk to reset the spelling of a language so completely. If that hadn’t happened, you’d have likely seen laet and let pronounced identically and spelled differently, to keep continuity with Old English, and not just Middle English. But that kind of reset is the exception, not the rule. And I’m talking about wholesale resetting of the orthography, not the gradualist, consensus-seeking projects listed in much of the Spelling reform article.

The Middle English Dictionary Needs a Fucking Update: earliest attestation 1310, but it must have existed earlier. (Met the blogger 20 years ago, glad to see he’s kept the faith.)

swive – Wiktionary was arguably more popular.

My dad had to learn a bit of Turkish when he was working as a nurse in the (very) early 60s. By and large, no. I understand that in the past, a lot more Turks spoke Greek than Greeks spoke Turkish…

Depends, as with many of these things.

Yes, there is the reaction you mention. You will occasionally get Greeks (and non-Greeks) reminding you that the Roman Empire kept going for 1000 years after 476, thank you very much—though the relation of Greeks to Byzantium is more complicated than that.

There is the haunting feeling that we’ll never measure up to the ancient Greeks (one that the Byzantines shared).

There’s the reaction against that, with “we’re sick of hearing about the ancient Greeks”. You won’t get much of that aired to non-Greeks, but if you google  Αρχαίοι Ημών Πρόγονοι (“Our Ancient Ancestors” in Katharevousa) and can translate what is being said, much of it makes fun of Greek ancestor-worship.

It’s a profoundly ambivalent relationship. The unlettered peasants 300 years ago had a much more straightforward relationship with the Hellenes: they were this race of pagan giants, the folk who built all them ruins; and they died out because they fell over, and couldn’t get back up…

EDIT: See also Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors? (where I say pretty much the same.)

I’ll quote what someone else in that position said (originally posted about on my blog: .sig quoting Marcel Cohen, corrected; see also Language Regained).

Marcel Cohen was a Jewish author writing in French. His first language was Judaeo-Spanish (aka Djudio, Ladino), which he barely remembered as an adult. As a one-off, he wrote a memoir in Ladino in 1985, with a parallel French translation.

At the start of the book, he writes what it feels like to use a nearly extinct language:

“Dear Antonio. I’d like to write to you in Djudio, before the language of my ancestors is completely extinguished. You can’t imagine, Antonio, what the death agony of a language is like. You seem to discover yourself alone, in silence [every day that God grants you]. You’re sikelioso [sad], without knowing why. What I’m going to record here is more or less what my mind retains of the five centuries that my ancestors spent in Turkey. I was born in Asnieres, a suburb of Paris, and my parents were in their thirties when they came to live in France. They spoke French perfectly. At the time it was the language of all the Jews of the former Ottoman Empire. They learned it at an early age in the schools of the Alliance israelite universelle, then in Istanbul at the Lycée de Galata Sarail. How could they not have loved France. This didn’t by any means stop them from speaking Judeo at home. And so it was that listening to them I was immersed in the language, without exactly speaking it myself.”

The phrase in brackets was left out in the French translation by the author: it was something the author felt that a Ladino-speaker could say, but a French-speaker could not (Laïcité and all that.)

In practice: none. κοιτάω and κοιτάζω both mean “to look”, and are just morphological variants—of a kind quite common in Middle Greek, as new present tenses were being reconstructed from aorists. (Both -αζω and -αω verbs could have -ασ- aorists; so working backwards, you could end up with either present tense.)

There’s a slight register colouring in κοίταγε: for -αω verbs, Standard  Modern Greek exceptionally uses a Northern Greek imperfect ending, -ουσ-, whereas Peloponnesian (on which  Standard  Modern Greek is based) uses -αγ-. This means that κοίταγε sounds more informal than κοιτούσε, whereas κοίταζε is unmarked.

Squamish language uses <7> conventionally to substitute for IPA <ʔ>, and I can imagine other languages doing so if their Romanisation was influenced by  linguists. Squamish doesn’t use <!>, which turns up in Khoisan languages for clicks (Exclamation mark). Not convinced there’s a language that uses both, but who knows…

For the same reason of practicality, <8> substitutes in Wyandot language for <ȣ>: Ou (ligature).

From the original Lingua Franca: Mediterranean Lingua Franca. A Mediterranean pidgin based on Western European languages—or, as Greeks and Turks called Western Europeans, “Franks”.

If you’re a developer: much more disruptive than advertised. You have to undo the rootless mode if you do anything useful in Unix, which catches you unaware. Deprecating Java 1.6 (and I couldn’t get Java 1.6 working after a couple of hours) meant I switched to Java 1.8: much hilarity ensued, particularly with moving up to Eclipse Mars (4.5.0 is horrifically buggy; upgrade to 4.5.1 immediately). And the httpd.conf under Apache randomly got reset, so modules like jk_mod stopped loading for no discernable reason.