James Harkin
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
If we had not developed the printing press or if we only had had the great vowel shift 200 years before, it would be easy to learn English now.
And there wouldn't be all these mad exceptions where you just say, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to remember that for the rest of your life, that it's a bit different, that one.
But now, because spelling has been pretty well pinned and isn't changing, I guess it's not changing as fast as it would have done a thousand years ago because things were sliding all over the place, but we'll never spell handbag, handbag, which is what people say.
On a little other element of Middle English, there's a brilliant piece on, I don't know why it was on BBC Future, because it's about language a thousand years ago.
But anyway, it's a brilliant piece about how a thousand years ago, everyone had more pronouns than they do today.
Because English had all these pronouns that we just have naturally sanded off the language.
So there was wit, which we have the word we, meaning me and one person or more than one person.
We can be two people, three people.
Wit is specifically we too.
And it's a, you know, there are poems where it's, it's we too.
And it's sort of used as a romantic thing, you know.
we two yeah exactly if you're with an owl um and if there's our as well but our can be multiple people or it can be two people and you would have unker for mine and one other person's so there were all these pronouns that we used to have so in the old days if you ask someone what are your pronouns you'd be there a while because you know there were loads more um yeah just find that so interesting or get for you too