IN Friday’s Hear All Sides, Malcolm Bateson suggests that “British English is a glorious asset but let’s keep it simple”.

English grammar and structure may be so, in that we have lost the absurdity of having a gender ascribed to all objects with differing endings to adjectives and different forms of “the” and “a”, and we have lost most of our verb endings. For example: I run, we run, you run, they run, are all the same.

In some respects English is simple but what of its spelling and pronunciation?

Why does laughter not rhyme with slaughter? Why do herd, bird, word and curd rhyme though using four of the five vowels?

Why do we need a “w” in write and wrong, but not in right? How does “ph” come to sound like“f”?

German may have enormously long words, but if you see a word you can pronounce it. Italian is said to be similar.

Eric Gendle, Middlesbrough