So, if you collectively forget a word, does it disappear from the dictionary? And if you collectively do so, are there any known words that you don’t know anymore their spelling or pronunciation?
Yeah. There are a lot of words that people have stopped using and don’t remember how to pronounce. Sometimes we have clues from old writings and especially poetry, but archaic words and pronunciations are studied and recorded for posterity.
Consider the word “ye” as in “Ye Olde Shoppe.” We still see the word on signs where people want things to feel old, because it is a word we think we don’t use anymore. People reading it probably pronounce it “yee” or maybe “yeh.” Except the original word was spelled with an archaic letter called “thorn” that looks like a Y and isn’t used in English anymore. It made a “th” sound, and the sign should be pronounced “The Old Shop.” Thorn was replaced with Y when printing became popular, and people forgot it existed. We also have “yee” which is still used in some dialects (like Irish), but it considered archaic in American English. So when people saw the Ye Olde Shoppe signs, they forgot they knew how to pronounce the word already and assumed it was a different archaic word they remember they had forgotten, forgetting that they remembered the word in the first place.
Fascinating. I meant my other comment for those periods when not even recordings where available. In this case, that bit about poetry makes a lot of sense.
So, if you collectively forget a word, does it disappear from the dictionary? And if you collectively do so, are there any known words that you don’t know anymore their spelling or pronunciation?
Yeah. There are a lot of words that people have stopped using and don’t remember how to pronounce. Sometimes we have clues from old writings and especially poetry, but archaic words and pronunciations are studied and recorded for posterity.
Consider the word “ye” as in “Ye Olde Shoppe.” We still see the word on signs where people want things to feel old, because it is a word we think we don’t use anymore. People reading it probably pronounce it “yee” or maybe “yeh.” Except the original word was spelled with an archaic letter called “thorn” that looks like a Y and isn’t used in English anymore. It made a “th” sound, and the sign should be pronounced “The Old Shop.” Thorn was replaced with Y when printing became popular, and people forgot it existed. We also have “yee” which is still used in some dialects (like Irish), but it considered archaic in American English. So when people saw the Ye Olde Shoppe signs, they forgot they knew how to pronounce the word already and assumed it was a different archaic word they remember they had forgotten, forgetting that they remembered the word in the first place.
Fascinating. I meant my other comment for those periods when not even recordings where available. In this case, that bit about poetry makes a lot of sense.