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BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

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Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

#32
post #31

I believe that some people's actual full-time job is to translate software from US English to British English. I wonder what that job feels like after the thousandth time you've replaced color with colour and neighbor with neighbour

Correcting the number/date formatting will probably be the more challenging, yet still boring, Job, I guess.

Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

#34
post #6

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.

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 criti…

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.

Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

#35
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except now there's also the "Referrer-Policy" header, which is spelled correctly. I wonder if the spec committee debated calling it Referer-Policy for consistency.

Personally, I would have, since it refers to the Referer header it seems like it should follow the same spelling. It would be like CSS having a "color" attribute, but then doing something like "default-colour".

It’s actually more like CSS having a “colr” attribute and then doing something like “default-color”.

Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

#36
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, wouldn't the U.S as a nation essentially be a bastard child of Britain, and thusly use a bastardized English?

Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 criti…

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 r…

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