Comment by kibwen
2 days ago
Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the English aristocracy because they were jealous of how fancy the newly-respelled French looked.
Obliged to point out that Latin -or words were often spelled with -or, -our, and -ur in Old French also. If you are using Wiktionary as a source you have to click through to the Old French definitions to see the alternate forms, as well as parsing the descendant table to see the derived forms that the simple etymology blurb often leaves out. Doing so you can also see that Middle Dutch has 'coleur' (modern kleur) which very likely did not originate from Middle French given the timeframe.
The earliest quotations for colour in the Oxford English Dictionary are from around 1300 where it was spelled 'colur' (cf Welsh) which while being post-Norman England is not post-Norman English. For Norman/Angevin-England the OED also has a quotation for honour as 'onur' listed as before 1200 (and again as 'onour' from around 1300). If you want to make a case of superfluous 'u's being added a better example would be something like chancellor, where the 'u' was added in Middle English and then later removed, rather than colour (or honour) where the 'u's have existed since the earliest quotations. The reason color and honor stuck about in English is most likely because that is how they were spelled in Latin.
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.
However, that is not the perspective of the creator of BritCSS, who refers to current CSS property names as "bastardised" spellings.
It'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
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S/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.
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I mean, wouldn't the U.S as a nation essentially be a bastard child of Britain, and thusly use a bastardized English?
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The 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.
> 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.
That is true, but it's a trade-off made for other benefits. Why is there a silent "g" in "sign"? Because it provides semantic meaning - it preserves its connection to works like signatory, signature, significant, signal, etc. While English spelling doesn't always help you pronounce the word, it does help you identify its meaning. If it was spelled "sine" or "sin" (if you choose to also do away with silent "e"s in your spelling reform) that connection would be weakened or lost.
Also, this has a lot to do with the pronunciation of words changing over time and drifting out of sync with the spelling, but the spelling not changing to match the new pronunciation in order to preserve the aforementioned connection with similar words.
I don't know if the "g" in "sign" was pronounced at some point, but other silent letters today exist because the Norman scribes used them to indicate sounds that were in fact pronounced by the Anglo-Saxons at the time, such as the oft-maligned "ough" - a sound which has pretty much entirely disappeared from modern English (but as I understand can still be found in an extant distant relative: Dutch).
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Spelling 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.
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It's additionally funny that in French, "ou" reads as [u], that is, approximately like the wovel in "fool" (cf "jour", "amour", "troubadour", etc). I wonder if it was actually pronounced like "coloor" at any time in the past.
Yes! Wiktionary gives one such Middle English pronunciation here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colour#Middle_English
The second vowel, /uː/, is like in "true". (Note also the range of alternate spellings: colur, color, culur, coler, coloure, kolour.)
Another fun fact... almost all "American spelling" came from Britain, i.e. variants that died out in Old Blighty in the 1800s. Accent as well. For the most part, they were the ones that changed!
There's more—the -ize spelling comes directly from the old Greek spelling. -ise and -re were forced-on/taken from French. The British like to taunt the French, but apparently have forgotten about the spelling thing, and criticize Americans (unknowingly) for not doing the same.
In short, don't take any crap from Brits on the subject, haha. Most of my chats with them happened during my backpacking days, before Wikipedia and so I was not able to explain at the time. I believed it too with no other information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
It’s a common misconception that American accents have changed less than British accents. Both accents have changed. There’s a pretty obvious example that American accents have changed in the fact that many American accents have vowel mergers that result in pronunciation mergers of syllables with different spellings that aren’t merged in non-American accents. Wikipedia gives the example odd-facade-thawed, which all rhyme in most American accents but which have completely different sounds in non-American accents.
Likewise some American accents have lost the distinction between the vowels in marry-Mary-merry, or merge the vowels in pin-pen.
If American accents had changed less then why would they continue to use spellings that no longer match pronunciation in their own accents but which do match in many non-American accents?
The reality is that both accent groups have diverged.
There are folks that do Shakespeare in the original accent, and it sounds modestly closer to the "average" American pronunciation than modern British.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronun...
Believe I saw a video on it on youtube or similar, where they have audio as well.
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The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially.
One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this.
Shakespearean English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Some good reddit threads on the matter:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ju72b/is_th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/j3imwe/is_it_t...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/9oke84/is_...
Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable decisions here. BrE standardised earlier and kept some Frenchisms like -ise (the OED maintains that -ize is correct with -ise being valid) but this was likely because -ise is correct for some words like advertise, or prise (which AmE dropped entirely for pry, and weirdly took up burglarize) and universal -ise makes spelling easier. In some cases it's just because words/pronunciations came much later from French in BrE whereas they came from Spanish and Italian in AmE. American spelling on the other hand was intentionally simplified, and although the spelling reform Webster wanted never truly happened (if it did you'd be speaking the American languaj) it did lead to the dropping of -our for -or, -re for -er, -oe for -e, etc.
I'm biased but I do prefer the etymological spelling, even if it means that we do say lieutenant differently.
“Better heritage” lol. Hardly.
How does modern French spell it?
However I think that when Americans brought it back they missed opportunity to get rid of 'c' and put 'k' there instead. Is 'c' even used in English language? It usually is just 'k' or 's'.
Usually, but not always. Here you go—'cinch'. Could replace the first 'c' with s, but the second instance would be a little more difficult, as 'sh' has a softer pronunciation than 'ch' here, which itself is not as hard as 'j' (emoji) or 'ge' (rage).
Hmm yes I forgot about č case.
In Old English, ‘c’ was always hard and the soft sound used ‘s’. ‘K’ was not used or at least not common. We got the mixed up ‘c’ sounds with the Norman French influence.
Webster and a few other folks tried. It just didn't stick.