4 ms·

It'll be interesting to see what happens - if spelling is the same or confused for long enough I suspect the pronunciation will also merge, and then we'll have

It'll be interesting to see what happens - if spelling is the same or confused for long enough I suspect the pronunciation will also merge, and then we'll have the difficulty of confused meanings - e.g. lose the hounds vs loose the hounds (a potentially fatal error), but if a word like loose is used infrequently enough, it may simply die out, even if the spelling lives on. I suppose people use loose for lose because they are unaware of the separate meaning and lose can have a long middle vowel, so we might end up with one word spelling: loose, meaning: lose. Perhaps as a reaction people will start to emphasise the pronunciation difference and they'll drift apart. NB that discussion of pronunciation does depend heavily on where you live - in one area the two might be clearly distinct, and in others almost indistinguishable. Another example of a common error is the bizarre and illogical it's and its, which I suspect will collapse to its at some point as people can't be bothered with the distinction and the context usually makes it clear. I loved this article because it pointed out that languages evolve mostly through mistakes or elisions which are common enough to become acceptable, and mistakes of 100 years ago become the accepted usage in future and enter the armoury of grammar pedants as indisputable truths.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
The pronunciation of read ("reed") and read ("red") never merged -- and you can find plenty of other examples if you go looking for wordplay, like evening (end of the day) and evening (making something even). People will only base their pronunciation on spelling when they've never heard the word spoken, but loose (not tight) and lose (not win) are both quite common. If its and it's were going to collapse (not an unreasonable guess), I'd bet in the other direction, with its dying and it's surviving. The mistake is pretty much always made in that direction today, as people think "'s for possessives" (or, less generously, as they think "better add an apostrophe").

thaumasiotes 13y ago

The pronunciation of read ("reed") and read ("red") never merged -- and you can find plenty of other examples if you go looking for wordplay, like evening (end of the day) and evening (making something even). People will only base their pronunciation on spelling when they've never heard the word spoken, but loose (not tight) and lose (not win) are both quite common. If its and it's were going to collapse (not an unreasonable guess), I'd bet in the other direction, with its dying and it's surviving. The mistake is pretty much always made in that direction today, as people think "'s for possessives" (or, less generously, as they think "better add an apostrophe").