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English today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and
by kogus 2y ago
English today is a delightful, expressive train wreck of grammar and spelling madness. But Old English really was not. It was a much more earthy, simple, and consistent language. Old English had a total of about 40,000 words. Today's English has almost half a million.
I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast".
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- mandibeet 2y agoThe language was largely phonetic, meaning words were spelled the way they sounded. This fact is my fav
- kogus 2y agoI love that too. English was spelled phonetically all the way up until the late 1400s, I believe. One fun by-product of purely phonetic spelling is that you could tell the accent of the author by the way they spelled words.