I say we should drop all letters that are totally useless, and also change the meaning and usages of the word "assort". Also fuffy flower should be the new name for dandelions, and people should be forbidden from using anything other than buttercups for testing people for butter likingness.
Good grief, apparently you *can* have a protest in favor of stupidity. I mean, stupid protests is one thing, but this sets a new record.
Ai dont see anithin ron with this sujeschon - it wood sertinly meik laif eeziyer for evribadi, not havin too wory abaut spelin.
Now that's a nasty akusition! edited to add an afterthought: On the other hand, we've already taken a "u" out of "color" and "forty", not to mention about half the letters out of "donuts" (was it not for British books, I would never have suspected they're actually "dough-nuts")... so why stop there? p Now, Grace, you may have the (metaphorical) coronary !
... We also apparently took the "a" out of "paedophile". Now is "pedicure" supposed to be spelled with an "a", or did we as a nation just turn "children-lovers" into "foot-lovers", which has an entirely different camp of followers? ... Or is "paedophile" a giant misnomer, and it really DOES mean "foot-lover", and we've initially just lumped every kind of sexual deviation under one word?
Ooops.. for the longest time I would spell it "fourty", thinking that it's the uber-correct way to write it. Then again, I also used to pronounce "listen" with a "t".. Thank you McLaren and Wikipedia! (Thanks to the latter, I know now that forty is the only number in English language that has the letters in its name going in alphabetical order. Way to go, forty!)
I think the worst one was when I found out that Americans spelt aeroplane "airplane". What, what? Soooooo lazy.
I'm sure Avgi could furnish us with a more detailed explanation, but the two are from different word roots. Paedo is the prefix indicating children and pedo is the prefix indicating feet. That's why it seems really odd to me that Americans should drop the a in paedo - although American English does standardly drop half of most diphthongs. Hence words like oestrogen in UK English being estrogen in American English, and so on. So, no, pedicure is not spelt with an a, and nor is forty with a u, as Dale so rightly points out. American English joke of the day: Q: What is 'Hi-Fi' short for? A: High-Figh.
English is an amazingly flexible language - you can do amazing things with it. It was George Bernard Shaw who pointed out that you can legitimately spell fish 'ghoti'... GH for F as in 'enough'... O for I as in 'women'... TI for SH as in 'nation'... And, as someone else here pointed out in another thread, the reason that the extra 'u' in words such as 'colour' and 'armour' doesn't appear in American English is that AE might be a more pure form of English, uncorrupted by the French spelling imported by the Normans. One of my favorite comments on AE vs British English comes from Dorothy Parker, a US wit from the middle years of the last century. On this occasion, she was speaking to a young American playwright who insisted on speaking as though he were British. Such affectation always irked her, so when he asked "What do you think of my shedule?", she replied, "I think it's full of skit." And by the wasy - why isn't 'phonetic' spelled the way it sounds? :biggrin:
I thought Celtic was a more pure form of English. Because the original Britons were driven westwards into Cornwall and Wales. But what do I know, I'm part Viking.
I thought the Norman influence on spelling would have occurred long before the foundation of the colonies - unless there's been a more recent french invasion that I missed?:smile:
It is true though that a lot of American spellings and pronunciations are how people in England used to spell the words and pronounce them, but we have taken on a new spelling and sound since the language was taken to America by early settlers - the same language has developed separately along different paths but remained almost the same with only a few changes. Nevertheless, not all the changes were made by Americans, some were made by the English in England. A good example that's still in common use is the word lieutenant, which used to sound the same as it does in America (pretty much how it looks) but has at some point been changed to sound like left-tenant in the UK, despite being still spelled the same. As for spelling in general, there was no regular consensus on how English words should be spelled until relatively recently. Writers used to pen novels in pretty much any way they felt like, usually according to which part of the country they lived in. Some current spellings of words that don’t seem to make a lot of sense actually came about because they look nicer. For instance it was decided that the “U” doesn’t look so good next to the “W” or “M”, when it became time to organize a proper dictionary that applied to the whole country, so where we had words like “wuman” and “cumpany” we now have “woman” and “company” – but still pronounce them the same as if they were spelled with a “U” and not an “O”, which is quite confusing to people learning English as a foreign language – you will, if you meet many who are living in England and picking up words from books and street signs etc, often here foreigners pronouncing the first half of “company” the same as the first half of “computer” because they don’t know we just changed the letters on a whim to make the word look nicer.
Indeed they were. But they didn't speak what would eventually become English; that was spoken by the folks that did the driving, the Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and other Germanic peoples who moved into the power vacuum the Romans left behind. For anyone interested in an extremely readable history of the development of English, check out Our Marvellous Native Tongue; The Life and Times of the English Language by Robert Clairborne. Maljonic, did you know that company, in the sense of a business association, came from the Latin cum pane, 'with bread,' because the first companies were organized by families in Italy, over dinner, during the Renaissance?
so... just what is the difference between the first half of company and the first half of computer? because i'm not finding it.
I think it's a regional accent thing. I suppose they are pronounced the same in some parts of the US. I pronounce them slightly differently. By the way, British English spelling was standardised by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. American English spelling was standardised by Noah Webster in the 19th century. Webster's the one who decided on "-or" instead of "-our", etc.
Most native English speakers, in England anyway and I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans are the same, don't pronounce the "Comp" in "Company" the same as they pronounce the "Comp" in "Computer", "Companion" or "Complaicent" - it is similar but not quite the same. The same is true for "Come", which is pronounced "Cum", and "Comfort", which is pronounced "Cumfort" - not Commfort or komfort like the "Com" in "Comma". It's all because of the "U" that was replaced by the "O" in these words, which in many cases came from latin words originally like Petronus Piledriver said. The accent plays a part in the UK so far as how we prounce the "U" sound within the word, but it is still pronounced as a "U" one way or another... for instance in northern parts of England the word Company has a real emphasis on the "U" as a shortened "oo in loom" sound, but the "U" in southern England sounds a lot more like the "A" in "cap"... so "Company" is pronounced "Cumpany" everywhere but sounds slightly different depending on your accent. I suppose that it's possible that some English speaking regions have lost the original sound all together and taken on the spelling as is, pronouncing the word Kommpany - but that usually sounds very foreign to most English speakers I think.
Spelling-pronunciations have also increased in Britain - and I imagine the same is true in many countries - with the general increase in literacy in the 20th Century. Words such as waistcoat and forehead - that used to always be 'weskit' and 'forrid' - now have new standard pronunciations derived from their spellings. This is also partly due to pronunciations given by TV and radio newsreaders when reading words they are unfamiliar with, which have, nevertheless, become standard. Where change or consolidation in spelling has been instigated formally - such as in the cases of Johnson and Webster - the aim has usually been simplification. I'm one of those who thinks it's a lot easier to learn how to write a language if it has a standardised spelling. There are those who'd disagree, but I would suggest it serves the purpose of communication far more effectively. Dropping of diphthongs in American English is another example of such simplification. However, Webster purportedly also made spelling changes to deliberately create differences between America and Britain, in an attempt to reinforce independence for the former colony. I find it interesting that American English has undergone less change since Shakespeare's time than British English has. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that there is still far more regional variation in British English than in the English spoken anywhere else in the world. Another good book if you're interested in the development of the English language is Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue.
