4 ms·
Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahr
by lucb1e 1y ago
Impartial foreigner here who has no stake in the old or new spelling. If you're combining ship and port, you can't just write shiport. Of course it's shiff-fahrt / shifffahrt? By what logic does anyone argue anything else?
- praptak 1y agoFirst of all, it was probably a descriptivist move. What I think happened is that people wrote 'ff' because 'fff' looked like a typo or was less convenient to write, so the linguistics codified that. Also, there are portmanteau words where the middle letters overlap, e.g. bro+romance=bromance.
- lucb1e 1y agoBromance does not sound like broromance in speech
- kazinator 1y agoI found a word like this in English. https://www.etymonline.com/word/chaffinch https://www.etymonline.com/word/chaffinch There may be others. When we turn to the letter 'l', we have the word skill-less which is not always written with a hyphen, in which case the three l's remain intact.
- bashkiddie 1y agoI can only guess: Once upon a time we used to write by hand. It was considered time consuming. Once upon a time we used to set books in lead letters. There were ligatures, where two consecutive letters hat a special spacing - like "fi" or "sz". If we allowed three consecutive letters, we would need to invent new ligatures. It is probably easier/cheaper to just forbid the spelling.