I spend a lot of time online and am old enough that my ears aren’t great despite the hearing aids. I have never seen nor heard what you’re talking about.
A couple thoughts:
If you see it “typed”, what you’re probably seeing is “I spoke and my phone translated what it thought it heard into typing. And of course I don’t proofread; the whole reason to dictate is to make input faster, not slower.”
Are you a native English speaker? If so, from which country? If not, where did you learn English? Are the people you perceive to be doing this native English speakers? If so, from which country? If not, any idea(s) where they did learn English?
It’s definitely a thing. I don’t think it’s any kind of intentional change, just a common error that is making it’s way towards acceptability, much to the annoyance of anyone who can actually spell.
There’s gotta be a whole class of spelling errors that autocorrect doesn’t fix and so people never catch on. My personal pet peeve is people not knowing that bias is not past tense. “My teacher was bias against me.”
In Germany, we actually call it Lasagne, but as a singular, so one would say “Ich hätte gerne eine Lasagne”, “I’d like to have a lasagne”. So we’re also wrong. And, yes, we also call the singular vegetable Zucchini, but some of us make it a point to order “Zwei Espressi” instead of “Espressos”.
In that example the past participle is wanted, not the past tense. With all the “have ran” and “have went” constructions, I predict that in 100 years the past participle will have disappear’ from English. All things consider’.
Recent loan words from Japanese such as “manga” tend to be treated as uncountable nouns so the plural form is the same as the singular form, similar to words such as “sheep” and “deer”. This is because most Japanese words don’t have plural forms.
But older loanwords words such as “kimono” take standard English pluralization.
Interesting observation, but to nitpick, dictionaries had been tending that way since Samuel Johnson a century earlier.
Traditional respelling systems for English use only the 26 ordinary letters of the Latin alphabet with diacritics, and are meant to be easy for native readers to understand. English dictionaries have used various such respelling systems to convey phonemic representations of the spoken word since Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the earliest being devised by James Buchanan was featured in his 1757 dictionary Linguæ Britannicæ Vera Pronunciatio,[5] although most words therein were not respelled but given diacritics;[6] since the language described by Buchanan was that of Scotland, William Kenrick responded in 1773 with A New Dictionary of the English Language, wherein the pronunciation of Southern England was covered and numbers rather than diacritics used to represent vowel sounds;[7] Thomas Sheridan devised a simpler scheme, which he employed in his successful 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language, a much larger work consisting of two volumes;[8][9] in 1791 John Walker produced A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, which achieved a great reputation and ran into some forty editions.[10][11] Today, such systems remain in use in American dictionaries for native English speakers,[12] but they have been replaced by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in linguistics references and many bilingual dictionaries published outside the United States.[13]
It’s easy to find spoken pronunciations online these days, but I wonder if anybody ever uses them for anything but the most unfamiliar words.
What we see from that era is a curated microsection of published literature, pushed by the late Victorian conviction that anything from the lower classes was vulgar and unfit.
As soon as the rotary press made huge runs of newspapers, magazines, and books cheap, the vast majority of written words were aimed at the lower classes. Think of penny dreadfuls in England and dime novels in America, along with easily affordable penny newspapers like the New York’s The Sun, the first to run lurid crime news, and story magazines about stalwart heroes battling pirates and Indians. Both countries had growing educational systems that provided increased literacy at a basic level. The middle and upper classes in 1850 were probably no more than 15% of the English population and less in America, so aiming at the 90% was financially lucrative. This stayed true in the 20th century with the story magazines turning into pulps, with gigantic readerships.
The hatred toward these publications by the top quartile reads amazingly similarly to today’s condemnation of social media.
Sometimes a solecism is just a solecism, and I do not necessarily mean some subtle applications of the subjunctive or slip-ups using the Saxon genitive.
However, language “loss” will only occur if it is no longer possible to express fine shades of meaning (singular vs plural!?) via alternative constructions or phrasing.
This portion of this discussion is the interesting bit to me (I also have never heard singular “women”) …
Is broader exposure homogenizing language, communication destroying localness, language as a result becoming standard and tasteless?
As Steinbeck posited was inevitable?
Or instead had the pace of linguistic diversification and evolution actually sped up, albeit not by physical regions as a basis for dialects but more virtual ones? As @Exapno_Mapcase opines?
And at what point does an error gain enough currency to become an acceptable variation, at least within a particular sociodemographic context?
I’ve noticed that, as well. Specifically, the irregular past participle is disappearing. Even more specifically, irregular verbs are becoming like regular verbs by having the past tense and past participle merge. You can say that a person disappeared as well as that they have disappeared. Now you can say a person ate and has ate. The past tense and past participle merge.
Maybe the trend will continue and some forms of English will become like Japanese which has only two irregular verbs, auxiliary verbs. Several hundred years hence only the verb to be will be irregular, perhaps.
In the past, language change was deemed acceptable when an appreciable fraction of what I loosely term “good” writers, those who had a national audience through books, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of print works, started including the change, without calling comment to it as a new word or in quotes.
In the 1960s, the American Heritage Dictionary introduced a usage panel, “a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language.” They do a now annual survey to ask about the acceptability of usage. To their shock and surprise, the first panel showed that virtually no usage was near universally voted up or down. Every expert had an idiosyncratic vocabulary that defied all earlier prescriptivist notions.
Nobody cares about the usage panel today. Truthfully, nobody really cared then. “Good” writers kept thinking that whatever they wrote was by definition good, unless a copyeditor or in-house style guide mandated otherwise.
The system functioned mostly by consensus. Writers judged each other and readers judged writers. To a point. Dan Brown is often given as an example of the worst writer in the world, although Fifty Shades of Grey’s E. L. James may have superseded him. Both continued to sell in the gazillions nevertheless.
Print used to be a curated world, with supposedly the best writers winning the prize of publication. Anyone who has read a slush pile of rejected manuscripts knows that this is largely true, with the usual great many exceptions. Curation on the internet is almost completely lacking. Anybody can publish, i.e., get their words available to the world’s readers, and many people who had little hope in the olden days now have thousands, even millions, of readers. Language will therefore change at a faster rate just by the sheer volume of uncurated writing from a vastly greater set of creators. We don’t even know where we are in the flood; the river may only have started to rise.
I have never seen this, certainly not “often.” My first thought would be the person learned English as a second language, or the autocorrect on their phone chose the wrong word. That’s not a mistake a native speaker would make.
Every time I’ve seen it, I took it to be simply a typo, of no more significance than any other typo.
It gets a little bit complicated, because the base word in standard Italian is zucca ‘gourd’. With the diminutive it’s zucchina, plural zucchine. The form with -o, -i is from a dialect that brought it to America.
My seventh grade English teacher (1979-80) used to make us recite the parts of the verb to be, in no particular order, as long as we got them all. I learned to rattle them off in the order she always wrote them on the board: is, are, was, were, be, being, been & am.
I’m pretty sure teachers don’t do this anymore, and don’t, in fact, teach the verb “to be,” nor the concept of infinitives very clearly. When I try to explain Hebrew infinitives to people under 40, they look at me blankly quite often, and I have to go back and explain what an infinitive is.
It’s not that it’s just called something different now, either.
Although the factoid that there are only two irregular verbs in Japanese is often cited, it’s not really true . From wiki:
Japanese verb conjugation is very regular, as is usual for an agglutinative language, but there are a number of exceptions. The best-known irregular verbs (不規則動詞[citation needed], fukisoku dōshi)are the common verbs する suru"do" and 来る kuru “come”, sometimes categorized as the two Group 3 verbs. As these are the only verbs frequently flagged as significantly irregular, they are sometimes misunderstood to be the only irregular verbs in Japanese. However, there are about a dozen irregular verbs in Japanese, depending on how one counts.
That’s because English “to be” is the result of a merger of three different roots that existed as three different verbs in Proto-Into-European into one. Hence the large variety of different verb forms which look nothing like one another. Some modern languages still retain different verbs for what would be “to be” in English, notably Spanish ser and estar.