Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "The Great Vowel Shift and the History of Britain." video.

  1.  @juststeve5542  English did, in fact, throw away gender entirely a Very long time ago. What it did Not throw away was the practice of marking the Sex on the noun for things that have one, and in some cases (humans and livestock mostly) the Age as well/instead. This happened centuries ago. The entire claim that English marks gender in any way (except in so far as gender is used as an euphemism for sex) is entirely false, propaganda put about by the ignorant in an attempt to support (or, more likely, be seen to be supporting) transgender individuals... Which mostly succeeded only in making those who actually knew what they were talking about on the matter Less sympathetic (how much varies, of course) and everyone Else more confused (and Everyone slightly more paranoid). Sort of like how removing the suffixes that indicated sex from professional titles was supposed to reduce sexism by making people not think of the jobs in question as "male by default", but in many cases either did nothing or meant that people were More likely to assume the sex based stereotypes regarding professions were true due to the lack of indication to the contrary. Regardless, it's not Gender. It is not a noun class system used for agreement, and it predates the idea that anyone should even care about gender in the sense of neural architecture/personal identity.
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  2.  @MillionthUsername  the claim that ghoti can (let alone should) be correctly pronounced as "fish" is entirely untrue. By the rules of English spelling (which not only exist, but are more regular than most people think. Mostly due to being more complicated than most people think and actually caring about the stress pattern despite not actually marking it) itan only be pronounced as "goaty". Position matters! Those characters cannot produce those sounds in those positions. Once you toss out That rule, it's equally valid to read it as a series of nulls, as all of them (in other positions again) are Silent. Meaning that it would read as " ". So, yeah, persistent myth. A joke at best.
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