From: David Dunham (ddunham@radiomail.net)
Date: Fri 22 Jul 1994 - 04:11:08 EEST
David Cake said
>Actually, it was my impression that at the beginnings of mass literacy, the
>written form was closer to what people actually said than it is today, as
>spelling was less formalised and more phonetic.
In English, at least, the spelling was frozen with the invention of printing and the dictionary. The language, meanwhile, merrily continued to evolve. Words like "knife" aren't spelled that way capriciously, the <k> and <e> were once sounded.
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