About 50% of our words, though, are not from English. We are lazy on the one hand, and very inventive on the other. Like I said, Shakeapeare came up with about 1,700 new words, such as hint, gust, critical, leapfrog, majestic, obscene, hurry, lonely, summit, fragrant, brittle. Gloomy worked for enough people; brisky didn't.
Ben Jonson came up with clumsy and strenuous. Sir Thomas Moore: exaggerate, explain, exact, absurdity. Coleridge: intensify.

But English is a downright weird language. "Cleave" means both the join and to separate. A fly is an insect and a zipper. In Medieval times a "boy" was used for a harlot and a "girl" was just a young person. We have 'a' and 'an' because of a spelling shift. Originally the 'n' was absorbed into the noun. Women put on a napron. Until though enough speech the n shifted to the article to form an apron. Likewise, apostrophes are always contractions. We get them as part of possessives because of an old contraction. Bookplates used to read something such as: John Smith, His Book. It got contracted to John Smith's Book. (Very few Janes owned books then, so know feminine of that.)

And you and Arnold would have appreciated that double consonants were both pronounced, so in femme the 'm's were both pronounced like we do with the 't's in hat trick.