Well, English is a living language, as opposed to Latin, and also has some of the most convoluted spelling and grammaticalicular rules of any language. There are also endless examples of specialized usage, such as "shall" for "will," which apparently was a product of English upper classes to set them apart from the lower classes.
Then there's local usage. My friend Ron Rau, who used to write some pretty poetical (and often funny) hunting stuff for early Gray's Sporting Journals, grw up in the U.P. of Michigan. He said a lot of the local dropped or added syllables to various words. His primary example was Morial Day, but they made up for the missing syllable with "insect repellement"--perhaps because spending much time outdoors during Morial Day weekend often required quite a bit of repellement.
