The i-a-u progression (eg, ring-rang-rung) seems to be altered this way frequently. The ship sunk instead of "The ship sank*. I’ve heard a couple of verbs gone the opposite direction, though: He has drank it instead of He has drunk it.
AFAIK, the producers of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids went with “shrunk” over “shrank” purely for consonance’s sake.
very possible in the case of times i’ve heard it spoken, but I have seen it typed too and someone suggested that it was potentially speech-to-text or some similar phone thing that had changed how they spelt something, which I also wouldn’t be surprised by. It’s cool to see all the responses in this thread, but it’s really great to have reassurance that this doesn’t seem to be something everyone is hearing and I don’t have reason to be scared that native speakers are losing the little details of language.
mostly saw it on Tiktok when I had that terrible app, also occasionally on Instagram, I can definitely get behind the ideas of non-native speakers and me misunderstanding dialect and autocorrect because it’s a lot more sensible than my immediate concern that English was just losing words. It’s cool to see all the talk about how languages get tiny changes, but it’s also great to have people who are very sure they haven’t seen this.
I can definitely see the speech-to-text typing. I personally am a native English speaker, speaking different American dialects throughout my childhood due to moving definitely affected how I learned English (my early childhood was spent with communities that did not all speak much or any great English, and I learned bita of Spanish very young as a required class simply to help students communicate better with each other.) The people I see making this mistake seem to be American individuals, or at least to me sound very American.
I really wouldn’t be surprised, knowing now that a lot of people haven’t really seen this, if it was just me. I tend to have words confused easily if someone doesn’t speak a certain way towards me, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these people just had small changes in dialect that I am not used to and therefore struggled to process.
That is a key and perceptive point. I don’t think we are at risk of that.
As language evolves by usage, it may be that more gradations and nuances become available as ideoms arise in response to changed circumstances.
Interesting. This:
Does not go with this:
IME, no USA-raised native English speaker would use “spelt” in that spot. No matter where or how many places in the USA they had or have lived.
UK, Canadian, or other former British Empire place? Sure. The USA? Nope.
I have never heard women used in the singular. I’m curious as to where the op heard this. I’m not questioning whether they heard it, but I’d like to know where heard it. Is it really a matter of the speaker or the listener? And I think language is shifting all the time and has since the beginning of language. The first great vowel shift started apx. in the 1400’s and the second is ongoing and nicely dovetails into commentary on the loss of regional accents.
Yes, I know. You even can see the remnant of Old English in “been,” which was probably two syllables. My point was that they now have to be memorized, and I don’t think teachers today drill kids on them like they used to. And ser & estar are not regular either.
There is this:
Isn’t all that just AI captions of what people are saying? That always has so many typos.
I saw it typed in comments but also heard it verbally, as a few others pointed out I very well could have been mishearing people who have an English dialect that i’m not personally acquainted with which affects their vowel pronunciation. Also yeah I just disregard the captions on most things as AI slop.
I rely heavily on captions at times and I definitely know that on pretty much any platform captions and subtitles aren’t all that reliable. YouTube is a complete mess with captions and doesn’t know a single word I swear, TikTok and Instagram are both bad, streaming platforms are decent but tend to just have words replaced.
See also “whip cream” instead of “whipped.” This used to drive me somewhat insane, until I realized the startling parallel “ice cream.” Only C. Montgomery Burns carefully says “iced cream,” but 100 years ago, pedants must have been annoyed by the same participle-less usage that’s universally unquestioned today.
Those are good examples. It seems the process has already begin.
began, silly.
Beginded?
FB Reels gave me a clip from The Crown in which QE2 gets into a car and tells the driver “Buckingham Palace”: the caption read “F*ck you, pal”.