posted in Asklemmy

Dagobah@Dagobah@lemmy.world
edited

What spelling, grammar or semantics rules have been lost in your lifetime?

Language is always changing. At one point ‘an apron’ was ‘a napron’ while words like ‘literally’ are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?

Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!

nore {she/her}@nore@sh.itjust.works

Replying to @⁨Dagobah@lemmy.world⁩

I don’t know if this fits the question, but in Brazil the “Portuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990” only started to take effect in 2009 (after I was born), in a transition state, and in 2015 it became official and obligatory.

The changes that I still fumble with are diacritics (e.g. “Idéia” -> “Ideia”) and hyphens (e.g. “contra-regra” -> “contrarregra”).

en
nore {she/her}@nore@sh.itjust.works

Replying to @⁨Dagobah@lemmy.world⁩

does Brazil have an outsized influence on Portuguese language development through media?

I don’t know since I only interact with other Brazilians, though from what I can remember of early to mid 2010s internet, European Portuguese was preferred over Brazilian Portuguese (as in, when a website or app had a PT translation it’d wouldn’t be PT-BR).
Nowadays, I believe both are commonly available.

Are Brazilian and continental Portuguese different enough to be called dialects?

The most common way to refer to Brazilian Portuguese that I’ve seen is that it’s a variant of European Portuguese, I’m not a linguist so I don’t know the difference between a variant and a dialect.