The 19 greatest linguistic spats of all time

mrsmig

Write. Write. Writey Write Write.
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The first example made me laugh - mostly because there's a Home Depot near me with many hand-written signs with errant apostrophes, and I always want to go around with a Sharpie and correct them.

Virginia has its historic Old Town Alexandria, where many of the merchants use "Olde" and "Towne" for their store names. Some years ago a vigilante was making the rounds of said stores after dark, drawing a big X through any extra "e" in ther signage.

P.S. It wasn't me.
 

thewonder

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I generally use "literally" to refer to something that has occurred as it has been explicitly delineated, but agree with the general absurdity that this article points to in these disputes.
 

Autumn Leaves

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Among the more “inside” stories, we’ve got the epic St. Petersburg vs. Moscow Linguistic School feud, going back to the early 20th century. The most important (just joking, simply the best-known one) part is the number of vowels. They in Moscow say there are five vowels in Russian, but we know there are six of them! :)

(The vowel of discord is “ы”, the one usually transliterated as “y” and sounding like the Turkish “ı”. The letter for it exists everywhere all right, but the sound itself is believed by those of the Moscow Linguistic School to be a variation of “i”).

Seriously, practically any time phonologists from the two capitals meet in the same room, expect ы-related banter.