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