• some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2 days ago

    Learn about the Great Vowel Shift and how the timing for it, as well as the timing of the printing press, created a mess of a language with few consistent rules. It’s a stupid (written) language because history made it that way.

    • blarghly@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I mean, you are kind of missing my point. Native English speakers (or writers) can communicate easily with each other. That is literally the only thing that matters in a language. The consistency of grammatical rules is irrelevant.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 day ago

        I didn’t miss your point. You missed mine, which I clarified by adding (written) to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about spoken language. We can speak. That’s fine. The book that I initially referenced is about the written language and I made an effort to clarify that. You didn’t pick up that I was only calling the written language stupid. But I also talked about the introduction of the printing press relative to the Great Vowel Shift, and you missed that too. It was always about writing, spelling, pronunciation, and grammatical rules: things that don’t matter in spoken language.