5 ms·

Not necessarily because pronunciation varies substantially across dialects and often also according to prosodic stress and phonetic context. For instance, the w

• WorldMaker 7y ago
  Drifts also occur in time as well as space. Chaucer's early Middle English or Shakespeare's later Middle English are still mostly readable to a modern English reader, but a lot of the pronunciations have shifted almost entirely. There's a sort of archival benefit to the divorce between writing and pronunciation, the slower pace in which written forms drift versus spoken forms. (Which would also seem to hint why it's somewhat of a natural language outcome of speech being somewhat more ephemeral and prone to drifting than written text that outlasts it in libraries and schools.)