It is indeed fascinating.
Great walk through linguistic history.
Spelling as well as pronuntiation varieations are an intriguing topic. Especially when we have to go back in time and there are not records to show us how and when those variations started.
I have always wonder how and when American English started to depart from British English in their more distinctive phonetic features (/-er/ vs /a/).
The very emergence of a dialect, which is a mutually intelligible variation of a language, but which can also develop into a totally distinctive language if its own is a mystery to me. Those processes are so slow, they are usually inpercetible for thousands of years.
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