Those who know me know that linguistics was my first love—if only I thought it could have paid my bills. On balance, I am not a universalist—philosophically or linguistically. I love Noam Chomsky and I like Steven Pinker (notwithstanding his Enlightenment nonsense), but I am partial to theories that privilege disorder over order and language as erosion. This erosion is why grammar Nazis will always have something to complain about—and this doesn’t even take into account the distinction between spoken and written language that these folks refuse to recognise.

This WSJ article crossed my feed, and I was compelled to comment. Entropy is alive and well. Phonetic morphology favours erosion, and grammar is emergent. Although the evolutionary (devolutionary?) motion is complex, we can see where the once voiced K in knight and knee are now silent. Knight has been through the wringer, being reduced from a three-syllable word to only one—from /k nɪç t/ to /nɑ́jts/, now rhyming with night, which also retains the silent gh. For those who mock Cockney’s ‘Keef’ (as in Richards), the F /f/ phoneme takes less effort than TH /θ/. Although I wouldn’t be surprised to witness this TH to F drift in a hundred years, I would be surprised to find myself still alive and breathing. Written language retains vestiges of older pronunciations that confound many.

This is all I really wanted to say, though I can leave with other examples. In English, we see going to degrade to goin’ to and then to gonna. En français, on voit « il n’y a pas » se transforme en « n’y a pas » à « y’a pas » ou « ce n’est pas ce que je veux dire » devient « c’est pas c’que j’veux dire ».