Transcript

[A dog is walked by an old lady wrapped in a blanket siting in a wheelchair] Old Lady: A doggo! [Close up of the old lady’s happy, yet not all there expression] Old Lady: A heccin good pupper. [A Nurse rushes to the Old Lady’s chair. The dog stairs at the Old Lady, the owner off screen] Old Lady: 13/10 good boi. Dog Owner: huh? [The nurse wheels the Old Lady away] Nurse: Don’t worry no one understands her- Old Lady: Could be a fren.

Link to artists website

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    That is interesting … but that’s the written language. Up until about 1950, literacy was only reserved for those who could actually afford a decent education. A hundred years ago, it was only a very small percentage of the population who could actually read or write. The vast majority of speakers spoke only a common language that was particular to their location and history … so the English they spoke was probably very different than what was being written by a nobleman from their time period.

    Another fascinating read is just basic Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain … one of the reasons his writing became so famous was the fact that he wrote his characters speaking in every day language that people spoke … not a polished aristocratic uptight proper English that only the most wealthiest and properly educated people could appreciate.

    The excerpts in that blog post are interesting but they would only represent the language of the most wealthiest people of their particular time. If you spoke and listened to a common worker from their same time period, you’d probably hear an entirely different language being spoken … and the difference would be even more pronounced the further back in time you went.

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago

        Most global historic statistics have fairly accurate information for first world countries but seldom have any for developing, third world countries or rural populations.

        I’m Canadian, Indigenous Canadian and my parents were born in the wilderness in the 1940s when starvation was still a thing when they were children. They got an education but one that centered around beating the ever loving shit out of you for being brown than in teaching them how to read or write. Even though they lived in a first world country, their generation in Indigenous Canada was more or less illiterate. And that was the style at the time … you counted only the people that were worth counting and you didn’t count those you didn’t care about (which was usually 90% of the rest of the world).

        So in the 1950s, when the US, UK and French average literacy rate was about 70% to 80%, they only represented less than 10% of the global population … most of the world was unrecorded, badly recorded or just ignored, the global average at the time was about 20% (or probably less)