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Re: USAGE: -i/yse vs -i/yze in England (and what the heck, NZ too).

From:Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@...>
Date:Sunday, December 16, 2001, 3:41
I never said there was anything _wrong_ with it, just that it wasn't
logical and meant to say it was inconsistant, because it wasn't brought in
by a higher force.

Tristan

On Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@...>: > > > Me? I find the British spellings illogical, the American revisions > > illogical (why get rid of the <u> in <colour>, when it's presence > > doesn't do anything (it being an unstressed syllable), but leave > > the <u> in <four> intact, even though that's the one that's going > > to make it rhyme with `hour'?). > > Because American spelling changes were never accomplished > by committee or government action. Noah Webster, who > thought that spelling should be reformed to differentiate > Americans from the British after the Revolution, basically > went to all the publishing houses he could and asked them > to use his new spelling system. Some of them stuck; others > didn't. > > (Besides, at the time Southerners would have seen any government > action to that effect as a conspiracy to lock the South out of > its lucrative textile trade with Great Britain, and so would > have blocked it in the Senate.) > > ===================================================================== > Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier> > > "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n / > Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..." > University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought / > 1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn" > Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers >