h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ok, I'm a bloody Yank I admit, but I am confused at the differnce between American and British spellings of words. For instance "Color" and "Colour" or labor or labour, was this part of the colonists trying to seperate themselves from the English that they dropped the "U" out of all the words that ended in "our"? then how come "our" didn't become "or?" I guess because "or" was already taken. Another thing, we Yanks changed a lot of words that ended in "se" into either "ze" or "ce" like in "practice" and "realize", and we switched the "re" in "centre." Was this some minuteman tactic so that they could tell that the British had not been interfering with their communications? So if they saw "center" spelled "centre" they could just throw it out because they know it came from a red coat? Another thing, have you noticed that deep southern and massachusetts accents, as well as new york accents sound like lower-class English accents if you listen to them long enough? And Canadian accents sound like stoned Scottish Accents, except for the french canadians which i still haven't figured out. You know recently I realized (or is it realised) that it wasn't the British that had funny accents as i had thought for most of my life, but it was in fact it was we Yanks that had the funny accents since the British invented the language in the first place. That really freaked me out. Ok, know that I've totally insulted the British Empire and most of her former possesions, I'll close this rant, not quite understanding what it was that I was talking about it in the first place. Oh sod it all, its all b******s if you ask me.

*grin*

26199

Noah Webster (he of the dictionary and The Little Red Spelling Book) tried to simplify English spelling. Hence your examples. Unfortunately the Americans weren't very powerful at the time and so it didn't catch on elsewhere. When you did start to rule the world it was too late. I think the variety is rather nice, except for having to fiddle with the spellcheck.

The first American dictionary made an attempt to bring some sense to the English language. If it sounded like -or as in color, the u was dropped. Obviously, the ou sound in our is required, so that u was left in place. When we say practice we say it with a soft c sound (which is technically also an s sound, so you've got me on that one) and when we say realize we say it with a z sound, so it was spelled like we pronounce it. Still, the work was only half-assed, as they didn't bother to try to sort out that whole -ough mess. So the original question was "why did they mess with the spellings?" The answer is they made more sense. Stubborn Brits and others will, of course, never admit this.

The 'ize' ending of words is an acceptable variant in British English, it's just not used much. They're usually followed in dictionaries by (Chiefly N Am). If you read 19th century novels by English authors, the 'ize' ending is used. It's like 'gotten' - the British stopped using it, but the Americans didn't.

As regards words like 'practice' and 'licence', we do use 'practise' and 'license', but they are verbs, whereas the '-ce' variants are nouns. A neat way I was taught to remember which spelling to use is to think of the words 'advice' and advise'.

If you were going to mess with the spelling of 'colour' to make more sense, then, based on my own pronunciation, it should be spelled 'kulla'

I guess both sides of the Atlantic, especially when taking regional accents into account, there are so many words that are pronounced unphonetically that the few words we spell differently pale into insignificance.

Colour / color is very much a special case for me, as a British computer programmer. I always use 'colour' when writing real English, but have become completely used to using 'color' when programming (not that I have much choice when all the system graphic function names are written using the US spelling.)
For consistency, I write my own function and variable names US style, but use British spelling in my comments, even within the same line of code.
I suppose it's vaguely like having context-dependent spelling for words like bear/bare, except the US color extends to the surface of the monitor, and from there on to the eye, it's a British colour.

In the UK we write 'foetus' whereas in the US they frop the 'o' - 'fetus'. Which is correct? 'Fetus' is close to the original Latin root (fetus = offspring), whereas the addition of the 'o' was a Victorian affectation. So the US spelling is, technically, more proper (if not correct )

Then you have the people who spell 'Antony' as 'Anthony'. I'm not saying the Romans didn't use the letter 'H'; they did. It's just that the name was, for example, 'Marcus Antonius' (Mark Antony), not Marcus Anthonius. So, if you're on about 'correct spelling'...

Personally, I don't care so much about spelling as long as it's correct for the country of origin (UK, USA, wherever), consistent, and I can understand it. It's poor grammar that really p*sses me off. I've even caught myself putting apostrophes where they don't belong, which I never used to!

Yeah, I hate that... I sometimes catch myself using 'your' instead of 'you're', and then have to jump up and down on my typing fingers to make sure I don't do it again (metaphorically, of course).

Symptoms of the age we live in?

Symptoms of not enough sleep, more likely.

26199

*boots thread back up to the top*

Thanks for re-awakening this thread.

Since my last posting, I've discovered that the '-ize' ending, used by Americans and considered 'acceptable' by the English, is actually the older spelling and is technically more correct. My sources for this are two books on correct usage, one of which states that '-ize' was replaced with '-ise' by the French, and the English decided that this was a better spelling, for some obscure reason. So I'm now happy to use '-ize'. I also say "don't have" instead of "haven't got", because "don't have" is more correct, grammatically. 'Get' and 'got' are over-used. I won't change the way I spell words like 'foetus' or 'haematite' (not that I use them much), or 'colour'. OK, so the 'o' in foetus may be a late addition and, according to my dictionary (Concise Oxford English), the roots for words like 'flavour' didn't have a 'u', so I don't know where we got it from. (Our spelling of words like 'haematite' is more correct, though.) But it's what I grew up with, so I'm sticking with it.

The original questioner is one of those interesting researchers who spent a couple of days on the site and then disappeared in a puff of smoke. It's fascinating that this came back on one of the few days that has an article about American English (Yo) on the front page

Yes, in many/most cases, American is actually archaic English. (I have been told that Canadian French sounds archaic to the French).

A lot of the difference is probably also due to the fact that when the first settlers left for the future US, there was no 'official' spelling of most words (pre-printing-press). Search me what's going on with car parts, like boot/trunk, hood/bonnet, etc. though.

But we've totally caught them out with 'disk' - how can it be a 'discography' then? Ha!

One of my tutors at Uni objected strongly to 'sulfur' (which is now the preferred official spelling) on the grounds that that would make it 'fosforus'. Aluminum is older - it was changed to aluminium to fit in with the other elements.

Gif

'Sulfur' is the official spelling of 'sulphur', probably because it's the way the Americans spell it. As for the spelling of aluminium / aluminum, the following explanation is based on one from the 'Worldwide words' web-site:

The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy), even though he was unable to isolate it: that took another two decades' work by others. He derived the name from the mineral called 'alumina', which itself had only been named in English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the French, who had based it on 'alum', a white mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other things.

Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it 'alumium' (this was in 1807) then changing it to 'aluminum', and finally settling on 'aluminium' in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred 'aluminium' right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in '-ium', like 'potassium', 'sodium', and 'magnesium', all of which had been named by Davy.

The spelling in '-um' continued in occasional use in Britain for a while, though that in '-ium' soon predominated. In the USA - perhaps oddly in view of its later history - the standard spelling was 'aluminium' right from the start. This is the only form given in Noah Webster's Dictionary of 1828, and seems to have been standard among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth century; it was the preferred version in The Century Dictionary of 1889 and is the only spelling given in the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913. However, there is evidence that the spelling without the final 'i' was used in various trades and professions in the US from the 1830s onwards and that by the 1870s it had become the more common one in American writing generally.

Actually, neither version was often encountered early on: up to about 1855 it had only ever been made in pinhead quantities because it was so hard to extract from its ores; a new French process that involved liquid sodium improved on that to the extent that Emperor Napoleon III had some aluminium cutlery made for state banquets, but it still cost much more than gold. When the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus in London was cast from aluminium in 1893 it was still an exotic and expensive choice. This changed only when a way of extracting the metal using cheap hydroelectricity was developed.


So there you have it. Technically, Giford is right about the spelling being changed to match the other elements, but it wasn't a recent thing. Apart from a 5-year period in the early 19th century, 'aluminium' has always been the correct spelling and, 'officially', it was even the correct spelling in America for about 100 years. It's only common usage that has made 'aluminum' the 'correct' spelling in America. But that's how most words get their 'correct' spellings.