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English is often tabbed as a notoriously difficult language to learn, in part because it's rife with irregularities in spelling and pronunciation, thanks to centuries of English speakers' assimilating words from other languages. It doesn't help that in written English notable differences in spelling exist between the United States and the United Kingdom. For example, the British write centre, while Americans write center. The British write flavour, while Americans write flavor. The British write defence, while Americans write defense, and so on. According to the Oxford Dictionaries website, this variation is mainly because British English has tended to retain the original spelling of words borrowed from other languages, while American English favors simplified spellings reflecting the way the words are actually pronounced. A Facebook meme first shared in October 2018 purported to explain more precisely why this divergence between British English and American English took place, essentially boiling the issue down to commerce: The claim that Americans simplified the spellings of words because newspapers charged by the letter for advertising also turned up on Twitter: Before addressing this notion that American spelling conventions were dictated by the cost of advertising, we need to clarify a point about canceled vs. cancelled. Although canceled is listed as the preferred spelling of the past tense of cancel (and canceling the preferred spelling of its present participle) in American dictionaries, cancelled and cancelling are nonetheless recognized as legitimate variants. In such cases the preferred spelling is usually deemed the correct spelling (in school classrooms, publishing style guides, and spellchecking software, for example), but that standard is not an absolute. This touches on a higher truth about spelling and language in general, namely that correctness is in no small part a matter of convention. As to the central question of why certain British and American spelling conventions are different, the proposed answer under consideration -- that Americans adopted simplified spellings as a matter of frugality, as it were -- rests on the ostensibly factual claim that newspapers at one time charged advertisers by the letter. We have found zero evidence to support that claim. What we found, on the contrary, is that newspapers in early America typically charged advertisers according to the amount of space the copy took up. This was true from the very earliest days of the press in colonial America, according to an 1897 retrospective in the trade magazine Printers' Ink: By the early 1800s, says Margaret A. Blanshard's History of the Mass Media in the United States (2013), newspapers had begun pricing their advertising space based on the number of lines an ad contained. One example cited is the New York Sun, launched by Benjamin Day in 1833: By the turn of the twentieth century, Blanshard's book says, it was standard practice to charge by the line or by the word for any text-based, non-display advertising. We found no reference in that or any other source to publishers' charging by the letter. For the real story behind the differences in American and British spellings, we turn to a brief essay by SUNY Stony Brook professor Elyse Graham (who is currently authoring a history of the English language in New York City): Not all of Webster's ideas for spelling reform took hold -- indeed, he rejected some of those ideas himself (such as substituting hed for head, frend for friend, and speek for speak, etc.) -- but his efforts to simplify the written language, promulgated by the dictionaries he himself published, had a deep, long-lasting impact that is still felt today.
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