It doesn’t take much to raise questions about the English language that the casual user can’t answer. Why do we pronounce bury and berry the same way? Fury and jury look like the way they sound, but not bury.

In Old English, the word for bury was byrgan, and that “y” was pronounced like a short “oo” or “ew” as in took and few. Many other words used “y” and were converted to an “i” spelling. Bridge and kiss are two examples, but bury didn’t follow the normal route and retains, I gather, something of its historic sound. I suppose berry from Old English berie always sounded like we pronounce it today with bright and shallow 21st century American accents.

I learned another thing while looking this up. No, two things. First, the Internet isn’t great at teaching you how to pronounce certain types of words. Ask it how you pronounce the Old English gecyþnisse, and you’ll get this link, which is good. Ask it how to pronounce dryhten. Oh, it’s “driç.ten.” But I want to hear it, not read another spelling of it. And what about the “oo” sound for y’s?

Second, the words apple and berry are the original words for fruit. If the fruit in your hand isn’t a berry, it’s an apple, even as late as Middle English. Bananas in Middle English were “apples of paradise.” Dates to “finger-apples.” Cucumbers were “earth-apples,” and, yes, cucumbers are fruit. Melon developed in Greek from a word meaning “goard-apple” and was used generally for fruit.

Anyway, what else we got?

Crime Novel: A new comedic crime novel is “morbidly funny” and “lighthearted literary entertainment at its best.” City of Angles is playwright Johnathan Leaf’s first novel. You’ll be reading more about it in days to come.

Downgrading Education: “What worries today’s administrators about [great books] is not their purported irrelevance, nor the allegedly harmful language or controversial arguments they contain. It is rather the example they provide of characters like Huck Finn, who preferred eternal damnation to snitching on his friend Jim.”

Favorite Novel: “Simply put, Tristram Shandy is a novel I love, one I’ve reread more often than almost any other. It never wears out . . .” I remember one of my English professors loving it too.

And finally, a brief presentation of Rockwell Automation’s retro encabulator in easy to understand, common sense jargon.

Breaking News: A sequel demo was released last year, “living proof that leveraging existing assets is not plagiarism.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.