That’s actually a literary tool, used to indicate when a person is speaking with a heavy dialect. It’s so common that using phonetic spelling automatically triggers either regional pride or pigeonholing as a bumpkin. Consider:
“I can tell you’re in for a heap of trouble!”
“Ah kin tell yer in fer a heap o’ trouble!”
Which one the author uses depends on how much he wants to draw the accent into focus.
And though there has been some drift in spelling driven by reformers like Noah Webster in the USA, “cleaning up spelling” is often slow to catch on. For example, nite never replaced night except for when cutesy styling was wanted.
Yet there’s numerous functioning and widespread languages that have much more regular orthography. Prescribing historical links isn’t worth the literacy barriers it induces. Besides, learning history requires reading… much better than observing “nice” links between words to infer historical connections.
Wasn’t there a dictionary in which the words were deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers? Or are you referring to that?
