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Yup, spread of literacy + invention of movable type meant language got written down, reproduced easily, and thus by necessity formalized in terms of spelling and grammar. We can still understand Elizabethan English (~450 yrs ago); they were as perplexed by Old English as we are. https://twitter.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/1341379996363993088
English has still changed immensely as a language since the days of Shakespeare, but the changes are not nearly as noticeable in terms of grammar or spelling as they are in terms of vocabulary, where we have been massively (indeed, historically) acquisitive.
The other thing that literacy does is it creates a 'master dialect.' If you rendered various kinds of "ebonics" (urban African-American English) directly, phonetically, into print, with its slang & altered pronunciations, it would look quite different from 'standard' English.
But the thing is, that dialect doesn't get written down phonetically, even when some of its terms and grammatical constructions make their way into general colloquial written language. That's how literacy has semi-'frozen' language change, though not stopped it entirely.
This is another excellent point: technology (i.e. the fact that we have all this existing media of, well, *people talking* and barring the apocalypse it isn't going away) is another massive brake on pronunciation/sound changes. https://twitter.com/Ogiel23/status/1341385870650331140
The Great Vowel Shift (look it up) doesn't happen in a universe where people have thousands upon thousands of easily accessible recorded artifacts of their peers and predecessors speaking the language.
Sorry to bore you, folks. I just really enjoy this subject.
Okay, one more thing. To realize just how much the spoken language can actually diverge from what we all, as literate English speakers, understand as the "standard" language, do this fun experiment: write down a sentence you speak out loud phonetically, the way you speak it.
There is a 99% chance you make all sorts of elisions, slurs, and changes to the 'written' word as you speak. (Think about the various ways ppl pronounce "comfortable," for example.) Because of literacy & standarization, those have no chance of becoming part of the written canon.
Lots of people say "comfterbull" instead of "com-fort-a-ble." (I myself tend to pronounce the latter way most of the time, and the former way when I'm drunk.) But only one is an "acceptable" spelling.
On a linguistic level, what's happening in the "comfortable/comfterbull" situation is an extremely common process of historical sound change known as metathesis, where adjacent phonemes/vowels get transposed over times because certain cultural palates find them more amenable.
Here's another funny one that you've noticed your entire life, but never realized it was just a super-common language change thing: Brett Favre's last name. It should be "fahv-re" (and in France it would be). But of course it's "fahrv." The 'v' and the 'r' metathesized.
Meanwhile Jon Favreau's last name, which is etymologically identical to Brett Favre's, remains unmetathesized because it never lost that terminal -au sound that forces an English tongue to keep it as a two-syllable word instead of placing the accent up-front and shortening.
English generally has an incredibly strong bias towards placing accent on the first syllable of any word, which is why almost all of our most ancient ones do. It's only in the French/Latin/etc. loan words where you see accent falling mid-word or terminally.
