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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

#111

Post by nkrisc »

adrian_b wrote: post #77
troad wrote: 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.

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 o…

> 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).

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

#112

Post by rocky_raccoon »

nprateem wrote: post #75
DeathArrow wrote: post #62

At this point it seems we have two separate languages American and English and I say it as a non native speaker. Wach an US movie, then watch a British movie. Compare TV shows, compare news articles.

Then drop the words fanny and rubber into conversations with each for some puzzled expressions. Ironically, you'd use an American rubber with a British fanny.

Technically, you could use an American rubber with an American fanny too.

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

#114

Post by timeon »

kibwen wrote: 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.

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'.

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

#115

Post by adrian_b »

troad wrote: post #80
adrian_b wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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…

The spelling of a word is one thing, the writing system of a language is another thing.

Of course, the writing system of each language is a cultural artefact, which differs from the writing systems of other languages for various historical reasons.

On the other hand, for most languages the spelling of a word is determined by uniform rules, which are the same for most words, with the possible exception of a small number of words, typically recent loanwords from other languages.

In such languages for most words the spelling is not a "cultural artefact", but it is determined by the rules of the writing system, which have nothing to do with that individual word.

Few if any languages have, like English, words that come from a great multitude of sources, where each source had different spelling rules, so that now, when seeing a written word, one cannot guess which spelling rules have been applied to it, unless one knows the history of that individual word.

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

#116

Post by voidUpdate »

DeathArrow wrote: post #62

At this point it seems we have two separate languages American and English and I say it as a non native speaker. Wach an US movie, then watch a British movie. Compare TV shows, compare news articles.

I'd say its more of a cultural thing than a language thing

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

#117

Post by arp242 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #101
ChrisRR wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm english, my team is english. We use english spelling throughout. I'm not switching to american spelling to appease americans who aren't reading my code, in the same way as I'm not programming in french either

So you’d advocate that codebases should be written in the locale of the people writing them? What about open source projects, should they be dictated by the first language of the creator in most cases? You presumably can’t use British English for the standard library calls so now you have a mixture of languages which to me is pointless and more about the ego of the people writing things. I’m just in favour of consist…

> So you’d advocate that codebases should be written in the locale of the people writing them? What about open source projects, should they be dictated by the first language of the creator in most cases?

Yes. I'm the one writing the code and I can use whatever bloody spelling I damn well prefer. If someone else takes over then they're writing the code and they can use whatever spelling they want.

Trying to enforce some particular detail like spelling or whatnot for all of "open source" is just eyerolling. Use what you prefer and leave the rest alone. It's that simple.

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

#119

Post by card_zero »

nrvn wrote: post #108
bmn__ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enjoyable to me. It elevates the pronunciation that Shaw used into the status of the one true English and marginalises any other spoken variants, dialects all over the globe. This is presumptuous and unfair. How about this (equally unworkable) idea to achieve the goal of fixing the disconnect: instead of reforming the spelling, reform the pronunciation. Keep the writing as it is, but pronounce it to the rules (mo…

While I agree with you I can’t imagine reforming the pronunciation of - say - “Ought to cough and hiccough through the ploughing drought”.

Who would have thought there were so many tough pronunciations, though? They're all weird, but hiccough reigns soughreme.

Edit for thoroughness

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

#120

Post by InsideOutSanta »

tyleo wrote: post #107
varun_ch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, a Referer on the web is its own thing now. Referrer should be considered a typo if you’re referring to the Referer header.

They are paving a way to release a third spelling in the next update :p

If they just spelled it Refera, they could save another byte.
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