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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:26am on 2006-06-08 under ,

"English spelling is the way it is because of the timing of the introduction of printing in England. Caxton set up shop at the very end of the Middle English period and Middle English orthography became standard. Much the same way we are all damned to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous ASCII, even in this multi-ethnic, international computer world, just Because It Is There." -- John Lawler, "English Language History, with excursus on Technology"

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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 11:29pm on 2006-06-08
No offense to Mr. Lawler, but orthography in English didn't become well and truly reified until well after the 19th Century Prescrivists whacked at it. In fact, if I had to put an arbitrary date on when you could say English had pretty much standardised, I'd set it at about 1900 or so. My recent trip through what was fairly obviously a non-modernised edition of It Can't Happen Here (1935) suggests that there were some holdouts even then.

In any case, we're a bloody damn long way from Early Modern, let alone Middle, English orthography. Otherwise we'd still have the long s, the odd thorn and eth here and there, and a bunch of other strange typographical peculiarities.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 11:30pm on 2006-06-08
Damn! s/Prescrivists/Prescriptivists/g
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