Comment on Why do languages sometimes have letters which don't have consistent pronunciations?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In almost every language the writing was developed ventures or even millenia after spoken.
Writing is also more set, especially with the printing press it made changes very slow. So while spoken language keeps changing written lags further and further behind.
darthelmet@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Huh. I hadn’t even considered how technology might affect this. Interesting.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah, English is the go-to example because the first people to run printing presses in English were Dutch and couldn’t really spell or speak English.
There was likely similar situations in Asia as well, I’m just not familiar with their history.
bluGill@fedia.io 1 day ago
English was written long before the printing press. However it always (at least to my knowledge) used the latin alphabet which predates any written English I can find by more than 1000 years. Note that I'm not an expert on English linguistics, so if is someone claims something before 1200 I'm not aware of it but that doesn't mean they are wrong.