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How would you spell these double spelling words?
How would you spell these words?
swap or swop adviser or advisor ageing or aging acknowledgement or acknowledgment authorise or authorize imposter or impostor judgement or judgment wagon or waggon gray or grey
Uv koorss, aid spel dhem aes (Of course, I'd spell them as):
swaap aedvaiser eedjing aeknollidjmint oathurrais imposter djudjmint waegin gre
Dhaet sjuod bi "Travis" not "Guest" abbuv.
That should be "Travis" not "Guest" above.
"Acknowledgment" & "judgment" are particularly bad respellings because it's the <e> which makes the <dg> a /dZ/.
In a system I'd invented once they'd be. swop adviezer aijing acnolyjmynt authyriez imposter jujmynt wagyn gray
In the system you'd invented, Jim, how would you spell "chaos", "oasis" and "quiet"?
authorise = British.
authorize = American. acknowledgement/acknowledgment = can be spelt either way in both British English and American English. swap/swop = can be spelt either way in both British English and American English. Ageing = British Aging = American/Australian. adviser/advisor = are equally fine spellings in both British English and American English. There is no distinction between them. imposter/impostor = again, both are fine in both British English and American English. judgement/judgment = both are fine in both British English and American English. wagon/waggon = both are fine in both British English and American English. grey = British. gray = American.
Another example is the "aluminium" and "aluminum." "Aluminium" is British English and "aluminum" is American English. But why are they both spelt (or "spelled" if you are American) differently?
Here's the answer - ALUMINIUM VERSUS ALUMINUM Why two spellings? Following up a Topical Words piece on the international spelling of what British English writes as sulphur (American - sulfur), many American subscribers wrote in to ask about another element with two spellings: aluminium. The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who, you may recall, “abominated gravy, and lived in the odium of having discovered sodium”), even though he was unable to isolate it: that took another two decades’ work by others. He derived the name from the mineral called alumina, which itself had only been named in English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the French, who had based it on alum, a white mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other things. Chemically, this is potassium aluminium sulphate (a name which gives me two further opportunities to parade my British spellings of chemical names). Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy. The spelling in –um continued in occasional use in Britain for a while, though that in –ium soon predominated. In the USA—perhaps oddly in view of its later history—the standard spelling was aluminium right from the start. This is the only form given in Noah Webster’s Dictionary of 1828, and seems to have been standard among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth century; it was the preferred version in The Century Dictionary of 1889 and is the only spelling given in the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913. However, there is evidence that the spelling without the final i was used in various trades and professions in the US from the 1830s onwards and that by the 1870s it had become the more common one in American writing generally. Actually, neither version was often encountered early on: up to about 1855 it had only ever been made in pinhead quantities because it was so hard to extract from its ores; a new French process that involved liquid sodium improved on that to the extent that Emperor Napoleon III had some aluminium cutlery made for state banquets, but it still cost much more than gold. When the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus in London was cast from aluminium in 1893 it was still an exotic and expensive choice. This changed only when a way of extracting the metal using cheap hydroelectricity was developed. The official change in the US to the –um spelling happened quite late: the American Chemical Society only adopted it in 1925. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) officially standardised on aluminium in 1990, though this has done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell it for day to day purposes. It’s a word that demonstrates the often tangled and subtle nature of word history, and how a simple statement about differences in spelling can cover a complicated story. www.worldwidewords.org
SULPHUR (UK) VS SULFUR (US)
SULPHUR Americans will perhaps class this spelling as another example of the olde-worlde quaintness of British life, since they have for the better part of two centuries been used to sulfur rather than sulphur. In this, they are now joined by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in Britain, who sent advice last week to head teachers that 14-year-olds taking school tests in science should adopt what was described as “internationally standardised” versions of this and other words, like fetus. A number of British newspaper commentators and teachers expressed opinions on this change, with varying degrees of apoplexy, that were partly based on a jingoistic feeling that, well, we invented the damn language, why should we have to conform to the way other people want to spell it? The phrase “American cultural imperialism” was also used. The School Standards Minister, Estelle Morris, told the QCA to think again (they don’t have to and they’re not going to: they’re an independent agency). The Conservative opposition education secretary, Theresa May, said the ruling was ridiculous and would only confuse teachers and pupils. All this despite the fact that the QCA had emphasised that “British English spelling should not be penalised”. Nobody is suggesting British people change these spellings for all purposes, only when using them in scientific contexts. The Royal Society of Chemistry rushed out a press release the next day to support the QCA, pointing out that standardisation is especially important for ease of communication (like looking things up in databases, for example, where variant versions of common terms are a bugbear). The Society added that standard chemical nomenclature already specifies the f forms of words like sulfur following agreement by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 1990. The difference in spelling, and the current controversy resulting from it, must be laid at the feet of the late Noah Webster, a humourless and deeply religious schoolmaster cum failed lawyer who, after 15 years’ work, published his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. One cannot imagine an individual less well suited to the creation of a dictionary; he knew very little of other languages, his ideas about etymology were based more on religion and wishful thinking than historical fact (he thought all languages derived from ancient Chaldee), and he had this bee in his bonnet about simplifying the language by removing unnecessary letters from words. His most influential book was not the Dictionary, but the earlier American Spelling Book, which went through about three hundred editions during his lifetime and after. This was very conventional by the standards of his day. It was only later that he began to advocate spelling reform, especially in a piece that had the splendid title An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation, published in 1789. His aim was to remove all extraneous letters from words and he put forward a whole range of suggestions to this end. His aim was also political: he wanted to make American orthography distinctive and through this to help weld the disparate 13 founding colonies into a nation. By 1806, though, when he published his first dictionary, he had backtracked on the more outlandish of his ideas, saying “it would be useless to attempt any change, even if practicable, in those anomalies which form whole classes of words, and in which, change would rather perplex than ease the learner” (still a strong argument against spelling reform). Because of his spelling revisions in the 1828 dictionary, Americans now write color, jewelry, theater and aluminum, as well as sulfur. Had it not been for the conservatism of his readers and publisher—and a “dictionary war” with a rival—that forced him to modify his views, Americans would also now have tuf (for tough), groop (for group) and tung (for tongue) among many others. The deciding factor in modern standardisation, of course, is the American influence on the language world-wide, and especially on the vocabulary of the technical world. This has been considerable, and is the basis for the recommendations of IUPAC and the QCA. The majority of English writers world-wide already spell the word sulfur; that it looks odd and suspicious to some British speakers is as much an indication of parochialism as patriotism. Interestingly, the IUPAC also said that aluminium should be so spelled—one for Britain, it might seem, except that what IUPAC was actually doing was bringing that spelling into line with the other 55 elements whose names end in -ium. The Royal Society of Chemistry tried to make the point that “in 18th and 19th century Britain it was commonplace for sulfur to be spelt with either an ‘f’ or ‘ph’ ”. In this, they take their case too far, since the Oxford English Dictionary entry shows that the word has had ph in the middle ever since spelling settled down about 1600. Except in the US after Noah Webster, of course, and now internationally. And that’s official. www.worldwidewords.org
"Because of his spelling revisions in the 1828 dictionary, Americans now write color, jewelry, theater and aluminum, as well as sulfur. Had it not been for the conservatism of his readers and publisher—and a “dictionary war” with a rival—that forced him to modify his views, Americans would also now have tuf (for tough), groop (for group) and tung (for tongue) among many others."
So Americans only spell words such as "colour" (color), "honour" (honor), "sulphur" (sulfur) because an American, not very good at languages, tried to get rid of "unnecessary" letters. Which means that they speak a very artificial, and wrong, version of English.
Please let me say one thing. "Liter"(for "litre") is a misleading way of spelling.
<<authorise = British.
authorize = American>> Again as you mentioned for the others both authorise and authorize are correct spellings in Britain. Most British publishers prefer "ize" spellings -Oxford University Press, Penuine, Pan, Macmillan, Doubleday, Blackwells, John Wiley and Sons, Routledge to name but a few. Newspapers, advertisers and government departments prefer "ise" spellings though. Authorize is technically the only correct spelling in the US Both "gray" and "grey" are possible spellings in the UK although I can't think of a single instance where I've ever seen the spelling "gray" used here. "Grey" has begun to be used more commonly in the US over the last 30 years or so. Both "aging" and "ageing" can be used in the UK. I tend to use "aging" although "ageing" tends to be used mostly in British publishing. Another I could have mentioned is focused or focussed. Both are correct in UK and the US.
<<Penuine>>
Should have read Penguin- one of Britain's largest book publishers.
Rick, that's interesting--I didn't even know "swop" was a spelling variant for "swap." I've only ever seen and used "swop." My own preferred usage for the words you listed is as follows:
swap advisor aging acknowledgement authorize impostor judgement wagon gray
i hate people spelling it swop
makes me think they are too stupid to know how to spell words not phonetically but maybe they are so clever to know that swop is valid spelling |