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

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Saturday, December 15, 2001, 9:26
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

Replies

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>-i/yse vs -i/yze in England (and what the heck,NZ too).
Tristan Alexander McLeay <anstouh@...>