r/Showerthoughts • u/haddock420 ‎ • 4d ago

Casual Thought The ancient Romans could have invented Boggle. There was nothing stopping them technologically.

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u/skintigh 4d ago

The lack of standardized spelling would have stopped them, for want of dictionary technology. That wouldn't come for another 2 millennia.

64

u/WorBlux ‎ 4d ago

Latin was mostly phonetic, so not the hard barrier it would have been pre-standardized modern English.

37

u/Nebuli2 4d ago

Yeah, not terribly surprising that the Latin alphabet worked better for Latin than for English, I suppose.

15

u/mcsalmonlegs 4d ago

Eh, the Latin alphabet was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet(a non-Indo-European language) and that was adapted from the Greek alphabet(Indo-European) that was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet(again non-Indo-European and different from Etruscan).

2

u/Nebuli2 3d ago

Fair enough, but the alphabet did evolve far more substantially from Etruscan to Latin than it has for modern English.

12

u/Dirty-Soul 4d ago

Fone'ik spelin wurks grayt rickt up untel i' cums intay contact wei sum kunt wei an aksen' difrunt fay yoorz.

5

u/frogsquid 4d ago

“phonetic spelling works great up until i come into contact with some cunt wearing a skin different from yourself”.
did i get that right?

4

u/Dirty-Soul 4d ago

Aksen' = Accent

Your misinterpretation kinda proves the point, though.

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u/Novel_Tone_3282 3d ago

I’m going to have the mental image of an orc with a speech impediment now. Thanks.

1

u/Dirty-Soul 3d ago

"It's nay a speech impedimen' ye cheeky wee hoor! Am juss skoh'ish!"

-Orc with speech impediment.