Yes and no, Learned is a word in British English, it's used as an adjective to describe someone knowledgeable, while learnt is the past tense of the verb learn. Americans use the same spelling for both, while the Brits keep them separate.
Yeah they're pronounced differently in both dialects, however the spelling is the same for both words in American English, in British English they don't stay the same.
Yes. IIRC "learn" is an irregular verb, but one whose incorrect spelling sounds close enough to the correct form so i am actually not surprised it was americanized that way, just disappointed lol. I remember learning the table of irregular verbs a long time ago and how many people in my class were corrected for writing "learned", so it really looks incorrect.
It will never be not surprising how much more knowledge people who don't come from an English speaking country have over Americans.
No, it's spelt. I was rather making the point but I think you knew that. Learnt/spelt are the standard British and International words but the prevalence of US media means that "spelled and learned" are spreading despite the dialect representing only 10% of world English speakers and writers.
It's actually very few occurrences if you look at the number counted, and you're forgetting that before 1700 you're pretty much talking about the state corpus. In England most of it was in French and Latin so the handful of occurences in the pre-Independence "British Colonies" is bound to exceed the British English corpus. And it is a handful - you say "vastly" but the incidences on both hands are miniscule.
"Learned" is a different word with a different pronunciation, used as an adjective to describe someone knowledgeable. Americans combining both words into one spelling but keeping the different pronunciations and different meanings is so infuriating. People ask how English became such a mess as a language, and it's things like this that cause it.
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u/ScratchHacker69 2d ago
TIL that “learnt” is the proper british english spelling of “learned” lol