> You presupposes that a spoken form is primary and a written form is derivative Not sure how much linguistic knowledge you're putting behind the claim that wr

> You presupposes that a spoken form is primary and a written form is derivative Not sure how much linguistic knowledge you're putting behind the claim that written forms influence pronunciation, but as far as I gathered from my feeble noob learnings, spoken language utterly dominated word development even with widespread print—contrary to folk etymological intuition. This might be changing only recently, with written communication becoming much more prevalent and especially with English-language web going ubiquitously global. E.g. computer terms may be borrowed into other languages through print first. You'll notice, however, that even with the web and text messaging around, people keep making mistakes that depend on them grokking language by hearing and speaking instead of writing and reading—e.g. “their/they're/there,” which is baffling for second-language-speakers who had to memorize each word and drill them by reading.