The newspaper's weather forecaster frequently writes "there can be rain" which sets my teeth on edge. Last week he/she excelled themselves by stating "there can be showers and roads can be wet". Really, what a surprise!
Totally - and people in future will have trouble understanding J.K. Rowling - and it matters not a jot whether grammar and spelling remain the same.
What's odd to get your head around is that language constantly morphs - it didn't get to 1601 (or whenever Shake-Spear died) and we moved on from his 'english' - his 'english' was morphing as he wrote. Now the changes move faster. And with AI chatbots it wouldn't surprise if they invented their own version of English (like all good teenagers do) and make what they say totally incomprehensible to the rest of us - language to exclude rather than include.
Yes @steveTu … and given that the UK regions were more distinct and accents more pronounced, it’s no wonder that pronunciations and consequently spellings varied across the country … just as nowadays the English language varies hugely as it’s used in places across the globe. American English, Jamaican English and the English used in Hong King are very different, but all are just as valid as each other. 😊
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Did you ever wonder why Americans all sound American, and Australians all sound Australian..... where did the original colonists come from to create those distinctive sounds?
I've long wondered about the development of languages rather than language. Why is German, for example, so different to French, Spanish, Italian. Those 3 have broadly the same base, so where did German originate?
But they don’t all sound the same @steveTu … the US accents and colloquialisms vary hugely … think of the voices of the Deep South compared with those of Philadelphia, Texas, New England or the Catskills.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
I heard an item on the news many moons ago, @Dovefromabove and @steveTu ,that the linguists and grammarians what are experts in deese fings had worked out that the Australian accent is very similar to the Georgian English accent (1740 - 1830). Obviously there were no voice recordings back then so how the heck do they work that out ?
When there's always biscuits in the tin, where's the fun in biscuits ?
It’s done by studying writing (literature but also diaries and private letters) from that era. As has been mentioned, spelling variations reveal variations in pronunciation … and of course the rhyming and scanning of the poetry of that time reveals accents and stresses.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
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Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.