John McWhorter

However, there are other linguists who would counter me on that.

And certainly it's true of words, that you try to use different words.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah.

So here is another question for you.

Natural selection means that creatures' changes are all or maybe mostly due to survival.

And so the longer neck of a giraffe presumably was so that it could reach higher.

That helped in terms of getting food.

And then there's the okapi, which is a giraffe that didn't happen to do that.

Now, of course, in language, the way I mainly think of it is that most change in a language, how you get from Old English, Beowulf, Middle English, Chaucer, Modern English, this, is not survival.

Old English was fine the way it was.

Middle English sounded perfectly normal to Chaucer.

This, to us, feels like the only way English should really be, and that's the way it's always been.

It's drift.

It's just that things happen, and you don't know it in your lifetime, and next thing you know, it's a different language.

Now, there's also drift in natural selection, right?

Why is it spelled like that?

It says made.

Why do we say made?

Because the a became e over time.