Do Language Academy Standards help?

[Cainntear]

I'm thinking the quality of the language revisions matters. The Spanish seemed to have been very smart in writing reforms.

Well there's certainly a considerable difference between standardising orthographic conventions and standardising the whole language. In principle I'm not against spelling reforms if well thought out, and I think a lot of languages suffer for having historical hangovers that are kept in place simply because the words were pronounced differently when they were first written down.

Ironically, though, English is the language that suffers most from anachronistic spellings, and precisely because of the lack of a standardising body: the Oxford dictionary was always a descriptive document, and the dictionary didn't attempt to standardise regional variation, so words are written with very different dialectal roots and different local orthographies, and teachers and editors didn't understand this.

In practice, there's a similar problem of the misunderstanding of what orthographic reforms are. The rules in the Scottish Gaelic Orthographic Conventions relate purely to spelling, and yet a great many people believe they're more than that, and invented prescriptions are incorrectly ascribed to the standard.

Myself, when a peer writes "tho" for "though" and I know they aren't misspelling it from ignorance, but rather an attempt at innovation, they lose me.

I don't do it myself, but in principle I really can't see a problem with it. It's what the language would prefer if we weren't actively preventing it from evolving.

And let's not mention the chasm that's grown between the enlightened who know that a sentence ends with two spaces and the others who imagine spaces are in short supply and they are helping to save the planet by conserving spaces.

Or the chasm between those who believe a sentence ends with two spaces and those that know that the traditional typesetting convention was for a space and a half after a period and that two spaces was simply the best approximation that could be managed by a manual typewriter, and that modern wordprocessors automatically increase the space after a period, leaving the document author with no need to manually insert any additional space.

[Cainntear]

Why not the other way around? Some American ways of spelling things (like the -ize endings) are older than the modern British ones.

It's not all that clear cut though. The -ise/-ize words were (I believe) first borrowed in with Latin S, then as the pronunciation naturalised into a /z/ sound the spelling followed. The Z spelling travelled/traveled over the Atlantic, and then Latin-obsessed schoolteachers in Britain declared that the S was the "correct" form (because Latin) and went back to the earlier form.

Is the resurrected S form older due to its origin, or is the Z form older because it never died?

There are some authoritative figures that have influenced the standard spelling practices in different countries (like Samuel Johnson for the British and Noah Webster for the Americans) and popularized certain ways of spelling, but even today different organizations and publishers use different spelling policies even inside the same country.

There's a fair difference between the two though. Johnson wanted to make a record of the language as it was (although he may have been affected by his own biases) whereas Webster actively sought to standardise/standardize as part of a nation-building agenda.

[Dragon27]

There's a fair difference between the two though. Johnson wanted to make a record of the language as it was (although he may have been affected by his own biases) whereas Webster actively sought to standardise/standardize as part of a nation-building agenda.

Sure, Webster had his own agenda and advocated the development of an American standard of English, but I don't understand what you mean by Johnson wanting to make a record of the language as it was. Didn't he fix and standardize spelling for many words, choosing one variant among many existing variants (usually, based on etymology)? Lord Chesterfield even called him a language Dictator.

It's not all that clear cut though. The -ise/-ize words were (I believe) first borrowed in with Latin S, then as the pronunciation naturalised into a /z/ sound the spelling followed. The Z spelling travelled/traveled over the Atlantic, and then Latin-obsessed schoolteachers in Britain declared that the S was the "correct" form (because Latin) and went back to the earlier form.

The spelling was etymologically "z" (first in Greek, and then in Latin), wasn't it? I didn't look into it in detail, I just rely on what I read from David Crystal. I'm not sure whether "ize" or "ise" was the earlier form that appeared in English specifically (probably, both forms were in usage), but I do remember that classical scholars in Early Modern times preferred the "ize" spelling based on etymological grounds (and many of those words appeared during that time anyway).

edit:
Okay, I opened the Wikipedia and it says thusly:

The -ize spelling is often incorrectly seen as an Americanism in Britain. It has been in use since the 15th century, predating the -ise spelling by over a century. The verb-forming suffix -ize comes directly from Ancient Greek -ίζειν (-ízein) or Late Latin -izāre, while -ise comes via French -iser. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) recommends -ize and lists the -ise form as an alternative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences#-ise,_-ize_(-isation,_-ization)

[Le Baron]

In those words English was strongly influenced by French. So even those words that arrived directly through Latin ended up being respelled in many cases. Are we to say French is also etymologically erroneous?

Sometimes people try to trip up those preferring -ise by referring to things like 'size', which comes from 'assizes', yet the earlier versions of that word were assises. Winding its way back to middle-English 'assisen' (appoint) and that back to old French assise (an assembly of 'sitting' judges). And finally Latin's assidere.

The sound system has little to do with spelling a lot of the time. After all in Dutch and German and other related languages most final 'd' sounds are like a 't' (from an English point-of-view).

[DaveAgain]

English as a whole. I think the US gov't backed some spelling reforms, which is why americans spell some words incorrectly!

Why not the other way around? Some American ways of spelling things (like the -ize endings) are older than the modern British ones.
Modern spelling wasn't decreed by some kind of governmental spelling reform (although there were some individuals who could be called "spelling reformers").

As I understand it President Roosevelt formally adopted some reformed spellings by decree, so government action was involved, if not the only driver.

https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org ... d-spelling

[luke]

As I understand it President Roosevelt formally adopted some reformed spellings by decree, so government action was involved, if not the only driver.

https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org ... d-spelling

Very interesting.

It doesn't look like many of the reforms of the Handbook of Simplified Spelling caught on. A few were already in use in some dictionaries. I imagine those were the primary ones that survived. E.G., colour => color, centre => center.

[Dragon27]

As I understand it President Roosevelt formally adopted some reformed spellings by decree, so government action was involved, if not the only driver.

https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org ... d-spelling

Yeah, there were a few failed reforms like that (I also heard about SR1). The only thing they managed to achieve is to demonstrate how utterly hopeless these attempts to regulate spelling are. Although this one somehow involved the president of the USA (but then, after a good round of mockery from the press from both sides of the pond, he got himself disinvolved and rescinded the order), it was originally developed by a non-governmental organization (founded by Andrew Carnegie). Some of the spellings are used nowadays, but in those cases it's often because the change to these new spellings was already under way and they were used by many people.

A more thorough account of how it actually went down on the wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplifie ... _300_words

[Dragon27]

E.G., colour => color, centre => center.

These spellings has already existed for a long time, of course.

Webster was a proponent of English spelling reform for reasons both philological and nationalistic. In A Companion to the American Revolution (2008), John Algeo notes: "it is often assumed that characteristically American spellings were invented by Noah Webster. He was very influential in popularizing certain spellings in America, but he did not originate them. Rather [...] he chose already existing options such as center, color and check for the simplicity, analogy or etymology". William Shakespeare's first folios, for example, used spellings such as center and color as much as centre and colour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ ... ifferences

Incidentally, "color" is the original Latin spelling of the word.

[DaveAgain]

Ironically, though, English is the language that suffers most from anachronistic spellings, and precisely because of the lack of a standardising body: the Oxford dictionary was always a descriptive document, and the dictionary didn't attempt to standardise regional variation, so words are written with very different dialectal roots and different local orthographies, and teachers and editors didn't understand this.

France has a standardising body and also has anachronistic spellings.

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I remember a radio programme about Le Robert and Larousse dictionaries. One difference between them was that when adding new words Le Robert tried to use the most popular spelling currently in use, while Larousse decided what the proper form should be and adopted that.

[Le Baron]

It makes me think of the pushback against spelling reforms in NL. I knew nothing about this originally, but noticed people writing 'Cadeau' as 'Kado' and when I enquired I was directed to the history of it and it's a madhouse. Over the years there have been several official changes and lots of propositions. Through the seventies there was a sort of 'spelling war', pretty much up to the 1995 reforms. The last was in 2006.

Lots of people find the spelling annoying. A often-used example is 'pannenkoek' (pancake) which used to be spelled without the middle 'n' and actually sounds like that when pronounced. This goes for a huge number of words (e.g. dronkenlap) where you can't hear the 'n' in any of them. I remember getting the slim book of alterations, more like a pamphlet) in 2006. The tinkering has been whether to give things a capital letter; whether hyphenated words should be non-hyphenated compounds (or vice-versa); regulating words according to patterns present in other similar words.

Some older people make spelling 'mistakes' because of all these changes.