this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Pythagoras' Law? (lemm.ee)
submitted 3 months ago by wrig9547@lemm.ee to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Pythagoras’ famous theory - which has long been proven and should be made into mathematical law - will never be, because the therm ‘Pythagorean Theorem’ sounds so pleasing.

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[–] Carrolade@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

English was not engineered from the ground up to be sensible and consistent. Instead it evolved slowly over time, as new things got tacked on year after year, and other things died out or drifted in pronunciation.

Here's what Middle English sounded like:

"Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour."

-Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how that is pronounced vs today. I imagine the spoken version drifts, but the sounds are more similar than the writing.

[–] Carrolade@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

We can't know for certain, since no audio recordings exist for obvious reasons, and we'd need a time machine to find a fluent, native speaker we can be confident is using period-correct pronunciations.

We can make educated guesses though, by deconstructing existing descendent languages and tracing back commonalities.

Here's what we've got so far:

https://youtu.be/5NB2Z6pZBNA

Also worthy of note that this sort of writing would've been distinct from daily commoner chit-chat, which would probably be more recognizable to us. Not sure how much of that got recorded and survived through the years though.