[windowshopping]

If this sort of thing interests you, I highly recommend the book Latin Alive, which traces the transformation of Latin over a thousand years into Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as its impact on modern English.

This blog post claims to make you never see things the same way again, but for me that book actually did accomplish that lofty claim. Mainly because I'll never really look at "mistakes" the same way again. Mistakes in language are just signs of change.

Example: It's slowly become standard to drop the -g off gerund tense verbs in English. It's still a mistake in writing, but if you say "I've been runnin' around all day," literally nobody would ever say "excuse me I think you mean RUNNING, with a G" - because it isn't considered a mistake anymore orally, even if it wouldn't be _written_ that way in formal writing. But in text messages you might spell it that way - casual writing. And change always starts orally and casually before eventually becoming the correct way to say something. In another 500 years, runnin might be the correct way to say it in whatever English is called by then, and running might sound the same way runneth sounds to us today.

Or, another possibility is the ending G will remain in writing, and it will just become fully silent, such that pronouncing it aloud at all sounds bizarre. That's how we got modern French! All those silent consonants used to be pronounced a long long time ago, but the written system remained the same even as the spoken version evolved.

[jhanschoo]

It's a bit surprising for me to see you describe final -g as such, because a lot of English speakers while they have lost the final plosive, still frequently pronounce the final nasal at the back of the mouth, hence analyzing -ng as a digraph representing that sound. Writing it as -n explicitly signifies the other more innovative pronunciation that just uses the usual nasal at the front of the mouth instead, that some but not all speakers use. Few speakers pronounce the plosive. I also wonder if assimilation may occur, e.g. a speaker may simultaneously prefer nuthin', and also lugging.