A word on why there is a difference between American and British English .... Originally, when English adopted the Roman alphabet and became a written language. all of the spelling was highly phonetic. Everyone became familiar with what sounds each letter made and how to form a written syllable and word. The trouble was that there was no standardization. Anyone could spell any word in any way that they wanted to. They spelled them phonetically, but some people pronounced some words a bit different from others and some sounds were similar and so could be represented by different letters. For the most part, though, if you spelled it the way it sounded then most people who could read could figure out what you were trying to write. As the language evolved pronunciations changed and a lot of people still spelled words the way they were used to even though they pronounced them differently. You had words like night. How did it get a spelling like that with the silent letters if it was spelled phonetically? It is likely that at one time, in Old English, every letter was pronounced and if you say that some of those adjoining consonants could not be pronounced like that it was probably because that originally there were vowel sounds between them that had been dropped and had never been spelled. With people using outdated spellings in this way a semi-standardization had been achieved, but it was not yet complete. Standardization did not come about until early modern English. Even then it was gradual. You might note that there were several ways to spell Shakespeare's name around the time that he was living. His own spelling was something like Shakespere. When the standardization was finally adopted the most common spellings for each spelling were usually used as the standard. Like I said, the language had done a lot of evolving since the alphabet had been introduced and the spelling was by then far from strictly phonetic. It was somewhat phonetic, but still there were a lot of silent letters and groups of letters that were pronounced one way in one word and another way in another word. As an example look at tough, through and ought. Once spelling was standardized, though, it became really hard to change it again, but some refinements in the standardization have been made over the centuries, just very slowly. So far I have been talking about a time before the English language had even appeared in America at all. When it finally did as British colonists arrived the language and its spellings were taken along. Since language, like everything else, continues to evolve the barrier of an ocean introduced the opportunity for different accents to develop, but that does not necessarily change spellings. Then how did the spellings diverge? Most of it came about because of John Dewey. He was an afficionado of language an library science and a few other things like philosophy in the early twentieth century. He was of the strong opinion that English should be restandardized and made phonetic again. I don't think he considered the fact that with linguistic evolution it would be nonphonetic again in just a few hundred years. But he did come up with a phonetic system of spelling and he started to write in his system. I remember once that a librarian told me that he wrote his book on library classification, the Dewey decimal system, in his system of spelling and that it was difficult to read because of that. Well, it turned out that a lot of his proposals caught on. Others did not. C o l o r instead of c o l o u r did catch on. N i t e instead of n i g h t did not. However, most of the differences between American spelling and British spelling can be blamed on John Dewey. Differences in the words that are used in specific situations like flashlight and torch and others can be just attributed to the divergence that will occur in any language when speakers of it are separated for a long time. When those differences build up to the point that the separate populations can no longer understand one another then a new language has come into existence. I do not know how the difference in punctuation came about. I do know, though, that British English uses a lot more punctuation than American English and when I read older books in American English, like from the early twentieth century, the American books seem to have more punctuation too. I suspect that Americans just got a bit more relaxed and not as much sticklers for "correctness." I have also noticed that American English has dropped some letters in the twentieth century too, like in words that are made past tense. For example, there is the word propel. The American spelling for the past tense is propeled. The British spelling is propelled. As late as the early 1960's the double L is found in American English. I have scanned some books where a double L is used for the past tense in all words that end in an L. More recent American books do not necessarily do that or it is hit or miss with some words spelled in the old way and others spelled with only one L. I suspect that this may be due to the influence of John Dewey too.
On 10/8/2012 8:10 PM, Cindy Rosenthal wrote:
If you're scanning it doesn't matter; if you're talking about choosing a book from the collection to read you can uncheck British in the language choices because we proofers identify books that aare in British rather than U.S. English. smile On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Martha Rafter <mlhr@xxxxxxx> wrote:Hi Netta, If the thought of Brittish English gives you the jitters, follow your own advice--avoid them! If there's ever a book that you really want to read in Brittish English, you can tackle it then. HTH! Marty -----Original Message----- From: Dornetta Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 1:21 PM To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: British English Ann; Why would you say that--I'm making it harder than it is? What is was saying was this...I have never read a book in British English and if I did, I didn't know. I don't think that I would willingly read a book in that format because it is confusing to me and when I read Marilyn's post, it heightened my confusion. Perhaps, I could "read" up on British English at some later point but not right now--way too much on my plate. My thought and worries and was just making a comment is all in the earlier post. Netta "Just because you are blind does not mean you lack vision"-Stevie Wonder To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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