American English spelling is ruining the english language. Us British folk can only but laugh at the way you spell some of our words. Do yourselves a favour, adopt the real english langauge or create your own.
American English spelling is ruining the english language. Us British folk can only but laugh at the way you spell some of our words. Do yourselves a favour, adopt the real english langauge or create your own.
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So… changing the way we spell and pronounce words *isn’t* creating our own?
If I wanted to go the obtuse route that you’ve chosen, I could just as easily say, “Get with the times! I can’t believe you’re still spelling them with your old fashioned spellings. You already can’t compete with our technology, our movies, our TV. You love America for these reasons–why should you pretend your language can compete with ours?”
Population of United States: ~300M
Population of UK+Australia+Canada: ~110M
Canada doesn’t even spell wholly in line with the British anymore. Oh, snap!
anonymous on July 7th, 2007 at 7:11 am | Link
wot u on abowt?
dp on July 8th, 2007 at 7:56 am | Link
“Us British folk”….
Wow! Apparently, your grammar is superior to ours as well. It seems we changed it to “We British” folk. What’s that you say? It always was “we” in that statement? Hmm… looks like the grammar cop has his own indiscretion.
Sub1ime14 on July 9th, 2007 at 11:42 am | Link
To tell you the truth, the British have always had the right way of spelling and pronouncing words. For example, the word clique is a french formed word, and for some reason American’s have a habit of calling it a click, which it isn’t. It’s French, so pronounce it with a French pronounciation.
The British follow the Queen’s language, which is the proper English. So saying they should “get with the times”, isn’t accurate in any sense of it all. They’re the ones doing the things as they’re suppose to and we got Americans fixing the way to spell things, so it’d make it easier when they dictate it, for someone to write it down.
How hard is it to put the letter “u” into color? Seriously? Or favorite? I don’t know, it doesn’t seem hard at all. And don’t get me started with program -I mean come on, let’s just stick with how things were done and go with the programme, looks quite elegant to me - :O)
Finally one more thing, I think the population number is a great example of why you should just give it a rest to even respond to this individual. A civilization with less individuals, has a higher chance of living in less chaos.
Well, that’s all.
my own name on July 11th, 2007 at 8:07 pm | Link
Who the f_ck first spelled the word program as programme anyway? Seriously, simplicity is the answer.
Shake on May 30th, 2008 at 1:08 pm | Link
What a fuss about nothing! Yes, American spelling is wrong, but it works for them, and the rest of us understand it, mostly. Webster had good intentions of course, but he was mistaken:
Firstly, he didn’t create a truly phonetic spelling. If he had you would spell color ‘culler’, favorite ‘fayverit’, weather (and whether) ‘wether’, and so on. He just removed a few letters from a few words under the premise that it “simplified” the system. A non-English speaker still cannot be sure how to pronounce a word just from the spelling (’indictment’? ‘cough’? ‘circuit’? ’sign’?). There are almost as many inconsistencies as there were in the original.
Secondly, phonetic spelling is a myth anyway. If I spelled words the way I say them, I would not spell all of them same as the Scots, or Irish, or Americans, because we speak with different accents. Pretty soon none of us would understand anything written by someone from the next county, let alone the other side of the world. No, the reality is that written words are just symbols. We might speak them differently, but we understand them (more or less) the same. In fact, the supposedly “anomalous” spellings can even be useful; we might confuse spoken words (wear/where, metal/mettle, bow/bough) that make more sense when written!
And finally - hey, American English is no simpler than British English! We “queue”, but you have to “wait in line”. We “burgle”, you “burglarize”. “Tap”, “faucet” (or whatever it is), pffft!
Postscript on numbers: the US is the only country that consistently uses Webster’s spelling. Canada is mixed, and UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India (>100 million English speakers), Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Hong Kong, English-speaking parts of Africa, and most other non-native English speakers, in general use the original spelling. My guess is that in population terms it’s about even.
Swivel on November 6th, 2008 at 3:32 am | Link
Bullocks. There is no “proper” English or you would still be writing like Shakespeare. Get off your high horse you pompous twats.
by the way - Color is from Latin and how the Brits used to spell it until you adopted the Old French colour. yuck. Along with most other words with our ending.
Mark on December 25th, 2008 at 4:52 pm | Link
Then there is the language of the Internet. Read anyones personal blog or home page (even professional sites) and you will see plenty of misspellings and bad grammar. The writers must have been class clowns, bullies, have slipped school altogether, or assume no personal pride in how they present themselves to others.
Mark, I liked your explanation of “color.” By the way, my car rides on 4 tires; not tyres.
I have no problem with how other countries spell, but there is an undercurrent of (some ) extreme liberal Americans who show part of their hatred for America by purposely spelling using the U.K. dictionary. I know of at least one, personally. She must still be offended that Americans apparently (in her mind) stole our country from the Brits, who have become one of most valuable allies.