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tyleritis t1_j9ps644 wrote

Reply to comment by RunDNA in TIL that in 1554 Elizabeth Crofts hid in a wall on Aldersgate Street, where she pretended to be a heavenly voice. Reputedly 17,000 people came to listen to her give out anti-Catholic propaganda. by Kurma-the-Turtle

I think you can get a sense of what people sounded like by how they spelled words

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spleenboggler t1_j9q487j wrote

Absolutely, considering that what worked as a rhymed couplet then, and doesn't work now, is a key clue in untangling how the pronunciations of words have changed over time.

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Mnemonics19 t1_j9q7ft3 wrote

Written words and spelling were not standardized until more recently (I don't remember when exactly, but it's definitely post 17th century). I've read texts from the 16-17th centuries that spell the same word differently in the same sentence. (Wrote my undergrad thesis on midwifery in the 17th century and had to read a lot of hand written text along with actual printed texts.)

It's really shocking how quickly you pick up on reading text from history, and how quickly the spellings just become normal to "translate."

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RobertoSantaClara t1_j9r64av wrote

I believe the whole reason why English spelling these days is "weird" is because we shifted our pronunciation from how it was originally when the words' spelling was standardised, so now we're stuck with outdated spellings suited for an entirely different manner of speaking.

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