On Reddit I always assumed that so many people can’t be that stupid uneducated and make these obvious mistakes for engagement bait.
But now that we are on Lemmy, and engagement gets you nowhere, I’m losing faith in humanity at a faster pace.
In my experience, these mistakes are made primarily by native speakers. Because they learned it by hearing and can’t tell the difference. Those who learned English as a second language learn through books and are explicitly taught the difference.
You would HATE being a person who could read in the Middle English era. There was no standardized spelling, people used many different conventions/regional spellings, and it was mostly either phonetic spelling or random French bullshit. Also some earlier writers used really conservative spelling to emulate Old English. It was the wild west out there.
For example, here’s a (not comprensive) list of the variant spellings you may see for each second person pronoun:
You can find a lot more about Middle English spellings in LALME (A Linguistics Atlas of Late Mediæval English) (electronic version here)
Some of the more innovative spellings come from Northern Middle English/Northumbria (northern England and southern Scotland, though the dialects of the latter would largely split off and develop mostly on its own in the early stages of Middle English and become Scots) and to a lesser extent Midlands Middle English/Mercian, in large part due to significant past influence of North Germanic/Scandinavian languages; i.e., Old Norse, which was somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English and caused/progressed both the loss of inflections and the formation & solidification of Modern English syntax (in particular, Old English syntax shifted to become near-identical to Old Norse syntax; Old English also entirely lost inflection of grammatical gender, grammarical case, etc. and adopted many core vocabulary of Old Norse). Those changes happened primarily to facilitate communication with vikings in the Danelaw, since Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were very eager to communicate with each other; things like declensions were very different in the two languages (the 12 different declensions of “the” probably weren’t fun to deal with for Scandinavians), so Old English speakers started omitting or simplifying them, and they mostly died off in (early) Middle English. English also completely lost dual pronouns (pronouns with exactly 2 referents). Word order was primarily SVO in Old Norse, so Old English’s relatively liberal word order (or lack of consistent word order) was simplified/regularized significantly to be more SVO.
Southern Middle English – the dialects of West Saxon and Kent – were significantly more conservative (partly due to having next to no influence from Norse). Those are where many more conservative spellings are from. The West Saxon dialects were the most influential/dominant (especially due to the Kingdom of Wessex’ great power) until the Norman Conquest, when East Midlands English (especially around London) took over that role.
Southern American English & Maritime Canadian English varieties were both primarily based on more southern English varieties – specifically, the time’s London English and West Country English. Appalachian English was also heavily influenced by Scottish English and the English of northern England. Canadian English in general was based on both Southern and Midlands English. Meanwhile, New England’s English was primarily derived from East Midlands dialects. Generally, dialects derived from the time’s West Country English are significantly more conservative and more similar to the general speech of ~15th century England, while more Midlands (of the time) influenced American and Canadian varieties are similar to standard ~17-18th century English. Dialects influenced by the time’s Scottish English and Northern English also generally contain a lot more conservative Anglic constructions – modern Appalachian/Southern American English varieties and modern Scottish/Northern varieties share a large amount of vocabulary and other features which were lost in other dialects.
Standard varieties of Modern British English are comparatively generally significantly more innovative and don’t share many features with Middle & Early Modern English varieties – general British English started diverging greatly from most other English dialects around the mid-to-late 18th century and early 19th century. This is also a reason why Australia and New Zealand English have a lot of features which seem to only partially agree with other English varieties. For example, the trap-bath vowel split, which was partially completed in Australia and is present in certain words, but not all words, and has variation in some words. When Australia was being colonized, Southern English varieties had recently begun undergoing the split, and it was considered a “Cockneyism” until Received Pronunciation was formed in the late 19th century and embraced it; it wasn’t fully progressed until around that time, which is why New Zealand English (which came from immigrants in the mid 19th century) mostly agrees with Southern English on those vowels.
Since you seem to be a good person to ask, and will probably give a better answer than Google, was the thorn somewhere in our current 26 letter alphabet at some point and got deleted, or was it already gone out of style by the time we settled in our current order?
Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn’t used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use “Y” as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. “ye olde” instead of “the olde”). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using “th”. A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by “Z” (With e.g. “MacKenȝie” yielding “MacKenzie” instead of “MacKenyie”) until it disappeared and spellings using “y”/“gh” (or “j”/“ch” when appropriate) replaced spellings using “ȝ”.
Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn’t get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by “uu”/“w”/“u” by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn’t die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace “ae” in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).
There were some other funny things in Old English & Middle English orthography; like omitting n/m and writing a macron over the preceding vowel to indicate the sound (like “cā” instead of “can”), in the same way that it occured in Latin/Latinate languages which lead to “ñ” and “ã”/“õ” in Spanish/Portuguese/Galician.
Haha yeah. Soon after becoming a linguist your first realization is how little everyone else knows about or cares to know about linguistics. Btw I edited to add a little more information if you’re interested.
I would have followed you, my brother, my captain, my king, you piece of shit.
Here’s looking at you, kid, you piece of shit.
A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others, you piece of shit.
Thanks for the adventures; now go have a new one you piece of shit! Love, Ellie.
Please, boss, don’t put that thing over my face, don’t put me in the dark. I’s afraid of the dark you piece of shit.
I’ll never let go, Jack, you piece of shit.
The best love is the kind that awakens the soul you piece of shit.
When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible, you piece of shit.
You want the moon? Just say the word, and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down you piece of shit.
You’re the first boy I ever kissed… and I want you to be the last you piece of shit.
Good morning, in less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in this history of mankind.
Mankind – that word should have new meaning for all of us today.
We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore.
We will be united in our common interests.
Perhaps its fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution – but from annihilation.
We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist.
And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice:
We will not go quietly into the night!
We will not vanish without a fight!
We’re going to live on!
We’re going to survive!
Today, we celebrate our Independence Day you piece of shit!
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