it’s all just made up. you can see old writings without spacing. or punctuation. you can’t even define what’s really a word universally. people just decided what’s what and standardized it at one point just for some consistency. that doesn’t mean things won’t change; they most definitely will.
Comment on Linguistics
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoI’ve noticed a tendency of people to combine words that are frequently seen together: “alot”, “aswell”, “noone”, etc.
Some of these catch on, like “nevertheless” and “whatsoever”. Maybe eventually “alot” and “noone” will become standard English, too.
pyre@lemmy.world 9 months ago
TheBat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Apart/a part is another one.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
“Apart” and “a part” are opposites, though. If you’re a part of something, you can’t be apart from it.
TheBat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes, and increasing number of people are using the former to mean latter.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I recall “noone” being taught as acceptable by my english teacher back in 2004. That being said, she’s also said some things that ended up being very wrong
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Whenever someone says “Noone wanted this” I always picture a big Irishman who has a deep appreciation for stuff Internet people are against.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I always imagine Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits whenever someone does that.
“Noone thinks I have a lovely daughter.” Yes, Mrs. Brown. Noone does.
Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com 9 months ago
Ampersand is another good example. “&” was considered the last letter of the alphabet for a while. Schoolchildren would recite the alphabet and finish it with the phrase “and, per se and” (“and, meaning and”).
The words got mashed together over time and the word “ampersand” was born.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
“Per se” means “in itself”, so it’s a shorter way of saying “also the word ‘and’ itself”.
vonxylofon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
No body writes noone as one word because there’s a similar word written that way.
DillyDaily@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don’t bat an eye at went the same way. “another” is the perfect example, it’s just “an other” combined.
It’s sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.
The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.
“An apron” is the modern usage of the word “napron”, and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for “a” and/or “an” resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.