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

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>
>
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