On Reddit I always assumed that so many people can't be that stupid uneducated and make these obvious mistakes for engagement bait.
But now that we are on Lemmy, and engagement gets you nowhere, I'm losing faith in humanity at a faster pace.
You would HATE being a person who could read in the Middle English era. There was no standardized spelling, people used many different conventions/regional spellings, and it was mostly either phonetic spelling or random French bullshit. Also some earlier writers used really conservative spelling to emulate Old English. It was the wild west out there.
For example, here's a (not comprensive) list of the variant spellings you may see for each second person pronoun:
Singular Nominative 2P:
thou, thoue, thow, thowe, thu, thue, þeu, þeou, thouȝ, thugh, thogh, ðhu; þou, þoue, þow, þowe, þu, þue, þouȝ, þugh, þogh, þo
(after alveolars and in contractions): tou, towe, touȝ, tu, to, te
Singular Objective 2P:
the, thee, thei, thi, thie, thy, ðe, de, þeo, þhe, yhe, ye, þe, þee, þi, þy
(after alveolars and in contractions): te
Singular Genitive, Dative, and Possessive 2P:
(usually before consonants): thi, thy, thei, they, yhi, yi, þhi; þei, þey, þy
(usually before vowels and "h"): thin, thyn, thine, thyne, thien, thyen, thein, theyn, thinne, yin; þin, þyn, þine, þyne, þinne; þines
(female referent): þinre, þire, þinen
(after "t" or "d"): ti, ty, tin, tyn, tine, tines
Plural Nominative 2P:
ye, yee, yeȝ, yhe, yie, iye, iȝe, hye, hie; ȝe, ȝee, ȝhe, ȝie, ȝeo; ge, gie, geo
Plural Objective 2P:
you, yow, youe, yowe, yo, yoe, yogh, yau, yaw, yeu, yew, yhu, yu, yw, yhow, yhou; ȝou, ȝow, ȝouȝ, ȝowȝ, ȝowe, ȝo, ȝu, ȝw, ȝuw, ȝue, ȝiou, ȝeu, ȝew, ȝewe, ȝau, ȝaw, ȝhou, ȝiu, ȝeou, ȝehw, ȝhowe; gou, gu, giu, geu, geau; ou, owe, eou, eow, eow, eo, eu, euwȝ, æu, hou, heou, heu
Plural Genitive & Dative 2P:
your, youre, yowr, yowre, ȝour, ȝoure yowyr, yowur, yor, yur, yure, yeur, yhure, yhour, yhoure; ȝowyr, ȝowur, ȝor, ȝore, ȝur, ȝure, ȝiore, ȝhour, ȝhoure, ȝaure, ȝiure, ȝiwer, ȝeur, ȝeure, ȝeuer, ȝeuwer, ȝewer, ȝewere; gur, gure, giur, giure, giuor, giuer, giuwer, giwer; ihore, ihoire, iure, eour, eoure, eouer, eouwer, eouwere, eower, eowwer, eore, eur, eure, euwer, euwere, eowrum, æure, our, oure, or, ore, ouer, ouwer, ouwere, ower, owur, hour
(early ME): þinen (genitive), þinum (dative), þirum (dative fem.)
Plural Possessive 2P:
youres, yourez, yours, youris, yurs, yowres, yowris, yowrys, yourn, youren; ȝours, ȝoures, ȝouris, ȝourys, ȝowers, ȝores, ȝures, ȝuris, ȝhurs, ȝourn, ȝouren; eowræs
You can find a lot more about Middle English spellings in LALME (A Linguistics Atlas of Late Mediæval English) (electronic version here)
Some of the more innovative spellings come from Northern Middle English/Northumbria (northern England and southern Scotland, though the dialects of the latter would largely split off and develop mostly on its own in the early stages of Middle English and become Scots) and to a lesser extent Midlands Middle English/Mercian, in large part due to significant past influence of North Germanic/Scandinavian languages; i.e., Old Norse, which was somewhat mutually intelligible with Old English and caused/progressed both the loss of inflections and the formation & solidification of Modern English syntax (in particular, Old English syntax shifted to become near-identical to Old Norse syntax; Old English also entirely lost inflection of grammatical gender, grammarical case, etc. and adopted many core vocabulary of Old Norse). Those changes happened primarily to facilitate communication with vikings in the Danelaw, since Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians were very eager to communicate with each other; things like declensions were very different in the two languages (the 12 different declensions of "the" probably weren't fun to deal with for Scandinavians), so Old English speakers started omitting or simplifying them, and they mostly died off in (early) Middle English. English also completely lost dual pronouns (pronouns with exactly 2 referents). Word order was primarily SVO in Old Norse, so Old English's relatively liberal word order (or lack of consistent word order) was simplified/regularized significantly to be more SVO.
Southern Middle English – the dialects of West Saxon and Kent – were significantly more conservative (partly due to having next to no influence from Norse). Those are where many more conservative spellings are from. The West Saxon dialects were the most influential/dominant (especially due to the Kingdom of Wessex' great power) until the Norman Conquest, when East Midlands English (especially around London) took over that role.
Southern American English & Maritime Canadian English varieties were both primarily based on more southern English varieties – specifically, the time's London English and West Country English. Appalachian English was also heavily influenced by Scottish English and the English of northern England. Canadian English in general was based on both Southern and Midlands English. Meanwhile, New England's English was primarily derived from East Midlands dialects. Generally, dialects derived from the time's West Country English are significantly more conservative and more similar to the general speech of ~15th century England, while more Midlands (of the time) influenced American and Canadian varieties are similar to standard ~17-18th century English. Dialects influenced by the time's Scottish English and Northern English also generally contain a lot more conservative Anglic constructions – modern Appalachian/Southern American English varieties and modern Scottish/Northern varieties share a large amount of vocabulary and other features which were lost in other dialects.
Standard varieties of Modern British English are comparatively generally significantly more innovative and don't share many features with Middle & Early Modern English varieties – general British English started diverging greatly from most other English dialects around the mid-to-late 18th century and early 19th century. This is also a reason why Australia and New Zealand English have a lot of features which seem to only partially agree with other English varieties. For example, the trap-bath vowel split, which was partially completed in Australia and is present in certain words, but not all words, and has variation in some words. When Australia was being colonized, Southern English varieties had recently begun undergoing the split, and it was considered a "Cockneyism" until Received Pronunciation was formed in the late 19th century and embraced it; it wasn't fully progressed until around that time, which is why New Zealand English (which came from immigrants in the mid 19th century) mostly agrees with Southern English on those vowels.
If I wasn't dead, I would hate being a person in Middle English era either way.
But thanks for the interesting article.
Since you seem to be a good person to ask, and will probably give a better answer than Google, was the thorn somewhere in our current 26 letter alphabet at some point and got deleted, or was it already gone out of style by the time we settled in our current order?
Þorn was in use since Fuþark (Germanic runes) but wasn't used to write Anglo-Saxon until around the 8th century. It died out after the printing press came into use, usually imported from France (or Germany or something occasionally) and not using some characters found in English at the time. Because of the lack of a Þ/þ key, typers started to use "Y" as a substitute (which is why you see e.g. "ye olde" instead of "the olde"). Eventually þorn just disappeared and people used the spellings using "th". A similar thing happened to Yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), where it was substituted for by "Z" (With e.g. "MacKenȝie" yielding "MacKenzie" instead of "MacKenyie") until it disappeared and spellings using "y"/"gh" (or "j"/"ch" when appropriate) replaced spellings using "ȝ".
Ðæt (Ð/ð/đ) was mostly replaced by þorn by Middle English so it didn't get to be slain by the printing press. Wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) was replaced by "uu"/"w"/"u" by Middle English too. Ash (Æ/æ) didn't die off, in large part because it was available on many printing presses of the time due to its usage in French and Latin, but it became obsolete for English words and was mostly used to replace "ae" in loanwords (especially from Latin and Greek).
There were some other funny things in Old English & Middle English orthography; like omitting n/m and writing a macron over the preceding vowel to indicate the sound (like "cā" instead of "can"), in the same way that it occured in Latin/Latinate languages which lead to "ñ" and "ã"/"õ" in Spanish/Portuguese/Galician.
Thank you for this answer! I will hopefully be able to use it in the near future to trigger my favorite response from people: "Why do you know that?"
Haha yeah. Soon after becoming a linguist your first realization is how little everyone else knows about or cares to know about linguistics. Btw I edited to add a little more information if you're interested.
In my experience, these mistakes are made primarily by native speakers. Because they learned it by hearing and can't tell the difference. Those who learned English as a second language learn through books and are explicitly taught the difference.
If you want to make cool things, you play Minecraft. If you want to do cool things, you play Terraria. In Minecraft, it's all about gathering resources and building, and the combat is an obstacle on the way to that. In Terraria, it's about combat, and you gather resources and reshape the world to help you fight bosses.
Minecraft is primarily a sandbox game with RPG elements, and Terraria is primarily an RPG with sandbox elements
You ever think about how weird it is that RPG means two different genres of game depending on whether it's a video game?
I bought Terraria when I was really into Minecraft. Didn’t like it at first because the only Minecraft thing is “pick up blocks and crafting”, but once I gave it a fair shake I absolutely loved it.
Fuck, now I have the game music stuck in my head from thinking about the game!
I obsessed with terraria for a while but never really bothered to try Minecraft. Just a matter of taste.
They're more different than people might expect. I like both, but they're very different experiences.
I have too many games to try terraria, the list of shit I paid for but haven't played is already too big
That's just cause you aren't farming for the achievements. On my old steam account I had well over 1000 hours of Terraria, and I still hadn't gotten em all. But with my new steam account I achieved them all pretty easily within 150 hours or so of fairly casual playtime
Freeform building and exploring, crafting, survival, pixel art, endless gameplay. There and definitely a lot of similarities, especially compared to say CS:GO.
Oh, and don't forget the insane modding communities.
Even though I love Minecraft, it's undeniable that Terraria actually has a lore, and the adventure part of it is much, much better than Minecraft's.
Oh, they definitely go about everything differently, but it's a relatively similar difference.
Like Chimpanzees and Aye Ayes. Both share the majority of their features, being primates, but they use them very differently.
Eh, i wouldn't call that freeform building and exploring. Rather unconstrained base building, sure, and open world exploration, but you can't disassemble the boss dungeon and rebuild it as a boat in hell. You can't automatically kill enemies in a pit of lava. There's no getting lost in your own mess of tunnels. And no one is making a working GPU out of Pals.
Also quite different. I think Terraria is objectively better than base game Minecraft, though, after their respective updates (which I blame Microsoft monetization). When modded, they're both great games.
I still love working against the clock to stop corruption from taking over my Terraria planet, though. Reclaiming land is a thing I like, but there are mods like that in Minecraft too that are really fun of you're into it.
Probably the only reason I did not get into Terraria as an experienced Minecraft player is that my brain really hates 2D worlds.
I realize I miss out on many wonderful games, but how the hell do you feel comfortable restricted to one plane? This constantly makes me as a character feel I'm out in the open from two sides, and God knows what's there.
Maybe it's some weird quirk, but my brain is strictly 3-dimensional.
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okay but in 3d space you are open from more sides, in terraria at least you can see those 2 sides, in minecraft theres always behind, above, and to the sides
Yes, but my brain subconsciously interprets 2D worlds as ones in which there are front and back (away from screen and in front of it), and I just can't look there and see what's there.
Like if you'd build a house with floor, two walls on the opposite sides, and the ceiling, and would decide to completely ignore that your house is actually a tube and two sides are wide open to the outside world.
Do you feel the same about top down 2d? (Factorio, Stardew Valley, etc.)?
If you think about it, sidescrollers are just top down with a weird gravity.
Top down is better, but I'd still rather have even pseudo-3D (like in many strategy games for example, especially older ones).
But yeah, I often challenge my mind thinking that "down" is very arbitrary and is just normally takes along the weight force vector :D
From my experience, Valheim is pretty close to Terraria in the general feeling of progression and exploration. While being a 3D game, albeit with a third-person camera
Which is yet another confusing thing for me :D
But I learned to play some third-person games, while others still hurt. For example, generally slower pace and auto-aim World of Wacraft is alright, but action-packed Warframe that also offers me to shoot in third person (why on goddamn Earth?) is killing me.
As per Valheim, I tried, but it felt odd to me. But thanks a lot for the recommendation!
Yeah, unfortunately, I can't think of the same type of game in true first person 3D. Maybe, Satisfactory (for building vast structures and automating) or 7 Days to Die (for the survival aspect).
Unrelated, but have you by chance played the Talos Principle games? Those are my favourite first person puzzle games, on the level of Portal and Portal 2.
For building vast structures, to me it's mostly Space Engineers, but that's another concept too, not exactly "build a gigafactory" type game. Still, building something big and cool it does.
I'm also sad MMOs are rarely first-person. Like, there was Tera, but it died immediately as I first heard of it, which is super unfortunate because it certainly seemed to tick my boxes.
I didn't play The Talos Principle, but heard about the game. Spent quite a while in both Portal games though - good times.
When Terraria came out, the first reaction some people had was "so, it's just a minecraft knock-off, but lame, because it's 2D?"
This endured about a millisecond until people noticed what Teraria was about.
That was before Minecraft's concepts were adapted in so many games.
Wasnt terraria fully released before minecraft?
Edit: the full release, not alpha or beta
Spinks has credited Minecraft as direct inspiration. Terraria was first released among the gobs and gobs of minecraft clones, yet it was obvious that Terraria wasn't a clone.
As for "Full Release", Terraria was first released as a fully working game, with it's 1.0 being the first public release in May 2011. Minecraft 1.0.0 was November 2011. Minecraft's first public release was Classic 0.0.11a in May 2009.