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

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

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