German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”.
English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”. […] “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.
