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Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the E
by kibwen 2y ago
Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the English aristocracy because they were jealous of how fancy the newly-respelled French looked.
- troad 2y agoObliged to point out that spelling is always an entirely cultural artefact, and that before colour was spelt color, it was spelt colos. There's nothing more correct about older forms, or newer forms, or any other forms. What matters is what is going to be clearest to your speech community and audience.
- FlamingMoe 2y agoHowever, that is not the perspective of the creator of BritCSS, who refers to current CSS property names as "bastardised" spellings.
- troad 2y agoS/he's wrong, simple as that. "The particular spatio-temporal version of speech that I grew up with is correct, and all others are bastardised" is not a defensible or - frankly - interesting position. Chaucer would find virtually all modern English to be debased; Bede would wince at Chaucer's English; and so on, forever. Nothing fruitful comes from cultivating arrogance towards the language of others. It is just as much a cherished part of their cultural inheritance as yours is to you.
- DrammBA 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- troad 2y agoBeing awkward? Totally.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kennysoona 2y agoNot a cultural thing, S/he's is just quicker and thus more efficient.
- LuciOfStars 2y ago(And exclusionary.)
- nooyurrsdey 2y agoThis site is exhausting sometimes. Y'all really have the ability to pedantically pick apart everything.
- DrammBA 2y agoI agree, getting my comment flagged for nitpicking spelling in a post about nitpicking spelling is very exhausting. Even more so when the person I nitpicked replied to my comment and showed no issue with my nitpick.
- DrammBA 2y agoAlso the downvotes don't really matter, here's another comment if you wish to downvote me again in this post. Ironically my flagged comment actually had an upvote before getting flagged.
- ccppurcell 2y agoIt's a joke.
- ruined 2y agoyour wrong
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- TrnsltLife 2y agoIs that like "my bad"?
- LuciOfStars 2y agoI find it ironic that you're making an argument about how language evolves in the same sentence that you insist on an awkward "s/he" instead of just using a singular "they" (or if you're Richard Stallman, whatever neopronoun he fancies, I forgot what it is)
- radiator 2y agothere exists nothing else other than a she or a he. Executive Order was signed more than a month ago, have you not heard?
- LuciOfStars 2y agoBuh-but what about muh egg prices?????!!!!111
- troad 2y agoAnd I find it totes ironical that you'd respond to a post advocating against language prescriptivism, and intolerance of other modes of speaking and writing, by trying to pick on variants you dislike. Point goes whoosh. Also, I "insist" on nothing, you're the only one with a chip on your shoulder about pronouns here.
- brailsafe 2y agoI mean, wouldn't the U.S as a nation essentially be a bastard child of Britain, and thusly use a bastardized English?
- defrost 2y agoThe colonies were acknowledged as the offspring of Britain .. the United States of America is more of a chosen fraternity of the emancipated offspring after they fled the control of their former legal guardians.
- rikroots 2y agoStrangely, it's the insular dialects across Britain that have become more bastardised over time. The North American English dialects are far more conservative when it comes to evolution. As this BBC article[1] says: "[...] although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer." [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20180207-how-americans...
- genewitch 2y agoI've heard more specifically the southern US dialect is probably closest. Not sure how deep or dirty in the south. I have about as hard a time understanding people with the US South accent as UK accents.
- nickt 2y agoWouldn’t that be Fitzenglish?
- ChrisRR 2y agoIt's fair to assume that if a brit writes something online, it's highly likely to be a piss take joke. We just don't waste our time writing /s on the end of every sentence
- GJim 2y agoIt must be said that the Americans are rather well known for an inability to spot the satire and sarcasm that pervades our conversation here in Blighty!
- matthewowen 2y agoyeah, but IME (as a british person) a lot of british people _do_ actually see it that way.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe transition in spelling from "colos" to "color" did not have anything with culture, but it has correctly reflected a change in the pronunciation of the word. English is one of few languages where the relationship between the writing and the pronunciation of the vowels is mostly unpredictable, so knowing whether a word is spelled with "o" or with "ou" does not help you to know how to pronounce it. So for the case of English, you are right that spelling is a cultural artefact, but not for the case of most languages, including Latin. The oscillations in the spelling of Old French were caused by the fact that French had acquired some vowels that did not exist in Latin, e.g. front rounded vowels, so the French speakers did not know what Latin letters should be used to write them, and there existed no standardizing institution to choose some official spelling.
- troad 2y agoSpelling is in every case a cultural artefact, even for languages more phonetic than English. Such an orthography still needs to make choices about what distinctions to reflect in writing (e.g. should the orthography reflect regular and predictable allophony? voicing assimilation? final obstruent devoicing?) and there's no correct answer to this, there are only various trade-offs. Colos to color was indeed part of a common sound change in early Latin (e.g. floses > flores), and led to new spelling, but many later substantive changes in Latin did not lead to any changes in spelling (e.g. the palatalisation of /k/ before front vowels). Similarly, English spelling used to change regularly to reflect changes in pronunciation, until Middle English, when it suddenly stopped and became largely fixed. And yet other languages continued to evolve orthographically after that point (e.g. major Czech spelling reforms in the 19th century). Why? All of this is entirely cultural. In certain societies and at certain times, language users will prefer phonetic spellings, and in other societies and at other times they will prefer etymological ones. Sometimes spellings can evolve dramatically in a short span of time, at other times they seem eternal and utterly immovable. Language is deeply cultural.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe spelling of a word is one thing, the writing system of a language is another thing. Of course, the writing system of each language is a cultural artefact, which differs from the writing systems of other languages for various historical reasons. On the other hand, for most languages the spelling of a word is determined by uniform rules, which are the same for most words, with the possible exception of a small number of words, typically recent loanwords from other languages. In such languages for most words the spelling is not a "cultural artefact", but it is determined by the rules of the writing system, which have nothing to do with that individual word. Few if any languages have, like English, words that come from a great multitude of sources, where each source had different spelling rules, so that now, when seeing a written word, one cannot guess which spelling rules have been applied to it, unless one knows the history of that individual word.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoAnother fun fact... almost all "American spelling" came from Britain, i.e. variants that died out in Old Blighty in the 1800s. Accent as well. For the most part, they were the ones that changed! There's more—the -ize spelling comes directly from the old Greek spelling. -ise and -re were forced-on/taken from French. The British like to taunt the French, but apparently have forgotten about the spelling thing, and criticize Americans (unknowingly) for not doing the same. In short, don't take any crap from Brits on the subject, haha. Most of my chats with them happened during my backpacking days, before Wikipedia and so I was not able to explain at the time. I believed it too with no other information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
- mathieuh 2y agoIt’s a common misconception that American accents have changed less than British accents. Both accents have changed. There’s a pretty obvious example that American accents have changed in the fact that many American accents have vowel mergers that result in pronunciation mergers of syllables with different spellings that aren’t merged in non-American accents. Wikipedia gives the example odd-facade-thawed, which all rhyme in most American accents but which have completely different sounds in non-American accents. Likewise some American accents have lost the distinction between the vowels in marry-Mary-merry, or merge the vowels in pin-pen. If American accents had changed less then why would they continue to use spellings that no longer match pronunciation in their own accents but which do match in many non-American accents? The reality is that both accent groups have diverged.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 2y agoThere are folks that do Shakespeare in the original accent, and it sounds modestly closer to the "average" American pronunciation than modern British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronun... Believe I saw a video on it on youtube or similar, where they have audio as well.
- nine_k 2y agoIt's additionally funny that in French, "ou" reads as [u], that is, approximately like the wovel in "fool" (cf "jour", "amour", "troubadour", etc). I wonder if it was actually pronounced like "coloor" at any time in the past.
- card_zero 2y agoYes! Wiktionary gives one such Middle English pronunciation here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colour#Middle_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colour#Middle_English The second vowel, /uː/, is like in "true". (Note also the range of alternate spellings: colur, color, culur, coler, coloure, kolour.)
- 0tfoaij 2y agoObliged to point out that Latin -or words were often spelled with -or, -our, and -ur in Old French also. If you are using Wiktionary as a source you have to click through to the Old French definitions to see the alternate forms, as well as parsing the descendant table to see the derived forms that the simple etymology blurb often leaves out. Doing so you can also see that Middle Dutch has 'coleur' (modern kleur) which very likely did not originate from Middle French given the timeframe. The earliest quotations for colour in the Oxford English Dictionary are from around 1300 where it was spelled 'colur' (cf Welsh) which while being post-Norman England is not post-Norman English. For Norman/Angevin-England the OED also has a quotation for honour as 'onur' listed as before 1200 (and again as 'onour' from around 1300). If you want to make a case of superfluous 'u's being added a better example would be something like chancellor, where the 'u' was added in Middle English and then later removed, rather than colour (or honour) where the 'u's have existed since the earliest quotations. The reason color and honor stuck about in English is most likely because that is how they were spelled in Latin.
- timeon 2y agoHowever I think that when Americans brought it back they missed opportunity to get rid of 'c' and put 'k' there instead. Is 'c' even used in English language? It usually is just 'k' or 's'.
- Tagbert 2y agoIn Old English, ‘c’ was always hard and the soft sound used ‘s’. ‘K’ was not used or at least not common. We got the mixed up ‘c’ sounds with the Norman French influence.
- atypicaluser 2y agoUsually, but not always. Here you go—'cinch'. Could replace the first 'c' with s, but the second instance would be a little more difficult, as 'sh' has a softer pronunciation than 'ch' here, which itself is not as hard as 'j' (emoji) or 'ge' (rage).
- timeon 2y agoHmm yes I forgot about č case.
- cguess 2y agoWebster and a few other folks tried. It just didn't stick.
- gizajob 2y agoHow does modern French spell it?