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Obliged 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 cor
by troad 2y ago
Obliged 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.