How the English language became such a mess

BBC ^ | 9 June 2015 | James Harbeck

[HandyDandy]

Curiously, as I read your post, I ran into the word “wound” twice. Both times my brain pronounced it incorrectly.

[Oratam]

They most certainly had chickens. I looked into a little deeper and found that because the Anglo-Saxon peasantry didn't typically eat beef, pork, mutton, or veal (these found their way the lord's table pretty exclusively) the Norman-French terms took precedent over the English. However, since the peasantry did eat chicken, calling the flesh by the English name was retained.

I seems the Normans ate chicken as well but probably had a preference for game birds, leaving the domesticated birds to producing eggs.

[rmlew]

And now? Now we don’t even want to spell things as they sound. How do spellings like hed, hart, lafter, dotter, and det look to you? Uneducated, perhaps? Annoyingly simplistic? Exactly. We enjoy our discomforts – and we really enjoy arbitrary practices that allow us to tell who are and aren’t the “right sort”. We’ve taken a useful tool and turned it into a social filter.
"Dotter" is correct in Swedish and Norwegian. So a good fredag to all of you.

[Cronos]

do you speak Swedish and Norwegian? is it true that they no longer use “he” or “she” but just use a generic “it”?