• blarghly@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    19 hours ago

    I mean, you are kind of missing my point. Native English speakers (or writers) can communicate easily with each other. That is literally the only thing that matters in a language. The consistency of grammatical rules is irrelevant.

    • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      19 hours ago

      I didn’t miss your point. You missed mine, which I clarified by adding (written) to make it clear that I wasn’t talking about spoken language. We can speak. That’s fine. The book that I initially referenced is about the written language and I made an effort to clarify that. You didn’t pick up that I was only calling the written language stupid. But I also talked about the introduction of the printing press relative to the Great Vowel Shift, and you missed that too. It was always about writing, spelling, pronunciation, and grammatical rules: things that don’t matter in spoken language.