Author: Dan Newman
Date: 17:02:10 02/14/00
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On February 14, 2000 at 16:11:15, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >Another off-topic post... > >It seems that the British colonists, when they first got to America, were >deathly afraid that the language would deviate and they would no longer be able >to communicate with the mother country. > >The result is that the US is using many words/phrases/spellings that were >correct 200 years ago in England. > >So an argument can be made that American English is actually the "correct" one! > >I'm not sure if "color" and "favor" are old spellings, though. > >-Tom All those odd variant American spellings originated, IIRC, in the mid to late 1800s, and were introduced by one of the major American dictionary makers in a misguided attempt to regularize/simplify spellings. I think there was a rather large movement at the time to phoneticize. So we got thru for through (which hasn't really stuck--I think it was introduced somewhat later though), color for colour, analyze for analyse, and so forth. The problem is if you change spellings you end up obscuring the etymology of the words which seems like a rather bad thing to do... -Dan.
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