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Top-level
 @lritter @aeva apropos of nothing, take long-existing English words, pronounce every letter with "gh" as German "ch" and a lot becomes clear night -> nicht -> nacht etc. 21 comments
   @ireneista @aeva @rygorous just an intuition but i feel there's a push-pull between at least two different factions: the "save energy, move mouth/hands less" faction (you see their handiwork everywhere), and the "we recognize elevated status in society by the use of multisyllabic technical terms under the guise of aiming for enhanced expressive precision" faction. in addition, language is not only used to foster understanding, it's also used for demarcation. youth slang is mostly this.  @aeva @lritter @rygorous Dutch and Norwegian have both been purposefully simplified on government initiative, in the mid 20th century, mostly removing a lot of pointless gender stuff. also as someone who just speedran Duolingo's Danish course it's kinda wild how all the Germanic languages start to just sound like dialects/strong accents once you get used to listening to it. @aeva @lritter btw worth looking up the actual Grimm's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law#Overview because that stuff is wild @aeva @lritter like the whole chain shift is a fun curiosity when you see it written but considering it's an actual systematic change in pronunciation that happened fairly consistently throughout the first millenium BC, where therefore speakers must have fairly consistently drifted in their phonetics across a fairly large region, is just bizarre to think about @jannem @rygorous @lritter swedish is such a beautiful language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7UmUX68KtE |
Gregory's Server
@lritter @aeva it's all those Germanic-root words with the ch sound Modern English no longer really has. Back when English orthography crystallized that old pronunciation was already on the way out but it's still the root of all those spellings of words that are now hella confusing because they have little to do with how they're actually said out loud today.