Re: CHAT behove etc (was: Natlag: Middle English impersonal verbs)

Sally Caves wrote:
> And look how successful that reform was.   No, really, it's worth asking
> why these reforms were rejected.  Noah Webster seems to have been more
> successful with his dictionary of American English than Sprague.
> Probably *because* he wrote a dictionary.
It's questionable how "successful" he was, considering that spellings
like "color" and "center" were already in use before Webster came along.
  Whereas, his truely innovative spellings, like "groop" and "frend" and
"giv", to name a few, were completely ignored.  It seems that, at most,
people simply used his dictionary selectively to justify the spellings
they were already using, giving them a dignity as "American spellings"
instead of simply "common errors"

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