Person with an English degree here.

Welcome to the speech and Berenstain timeline

is speech (or speach i guess) ever a verb? its a noun describing the talking. you don't speech, you speak.

"slow speech" "give a speech" "her speech" "speech writer" "speech class"

vs

"speak with an accent" "speaking of the mandella effect" "i love to listen to you speak"

i feel like youre getting ”speech” and ”speak" confused here...

It seems like maybe you just mixed up the spelling of speech and speak?

Speech isn't a verb, it's a noun. The verb would be speak. In English, nouns don't have their own tenses, they are interpreted from context. Here's an interesting article about temporal interpretation, if you're interested: https://blog.oup.com/2023/02/do-nouns-have-tense/

English degree and retired schoolmarm typing here.

If you and I were speaking in person, what we were doing could be described as the act of speech. (act and speech are both nouns in that phrase) For the past tense you would say we spoke.

Einstein (shamefaced edit correction: Doc Brown from the Back To The Future movies, duh!) up there looks like he's giving a speech. Speech is a noun, like a candy, or a damn, which he could also give if he chose to.

Sounds like somewhere in elementary school you got corrected on the spelling in the context of "he gave a speech" and decided that spelling was special to that meaning.

Which is reasonable and allowed you to continue thinking

(incorrectly, but also reasonably)

speak-->speach

But the truth is more boring, it's only the one word for ordinary and special speech. And the correct spelling is not the reasonable one you derived.

As to how it's been this long...It's the kind of error people might notice but assume it's a typo and not bother to mention, because it's not confusing.

OP were you taught by a vampire in school?

Okay... fuck... I too was convinced it was speach. As in "to give a speach". Welp, glad there's someone else from my original Everett branch.

C'mon, we all know what happened....

Time to dig up your high school yearbook

Does your family use it that way? Did you go to public school, home schooled?

I could see overworked teachers not noticing, especially if your hand writing is 'messy' or just that it's good enough.

I'm thinking your family has used it that way since forever and taught you that way as well, which I think would be pretty cool.

Ye olde speach.

"Speach" must be common usage in whatever universe you came from. It definitely isn't in this one. People are getting much more dumber, though, so if you starts using it more people might will does it too.

do you maybe read a lot of books with old grammar?