Re: [tied] A series of questions for the forum

At 7:54:43 on Friday, 8 July 2005, Carl Hult wrote:

> When studying ancient texts, have any of you or your
> predecessors taken into account the following:

> 1) Speech is changed by influence from the upper classes,
> such as speech impediments which has been proven to change
> the way folks speak. The "thick" R, the tongue root-R as
> we call it in swedish, is such an evolution which
> originated in a speech problem.

I don't believe that there is any evidence for this. See
the Linguist List discussion at
<http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-2186.html>.

> 2) They may have spelled a certain word wrong.

It's not very meaningful to talk about spelling a word wrong
unless the written culture in question has the notion of
standardized spelling. Until very recently most did not; a
person might spell the same word in different ways in the
same document without anyone considering it an error.

Brian