The English language has more than its share of oddities and inconsistencies. Did you know the words cap and hood derive from the same word but through different language families?

The original word, kaput came mostly unchanged into Latin (caput). This is where we get words like capital (head city) and cap as a head covering (originally, capuchon, which came through French with the Norman Invaders in 1066).

That same kaput word, however, changed when it went through the German consonant shift (based on Grimm’s Law) where k → h, p → f and t → d, so kaput became heafod in Anglo-Saxon’s influence on Old English (pronounced, I believe, as hefood). The f was dropped and we get head and words like hood as a head covering.

This is also why beheading and decapitation mean the same thing.

My point here is that even when we notice inconsistencies, oddities, and redundancies that make rules impossible, we can’t do much about such traditions. Esperanto is a nice idea, but it will hardly collect the mind-share currently enjoyed by English. However, English with all its quirks, allows this miraculous ability to allow me to communicate with you through time and space.