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“Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

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Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#31

Post by yxhuvud »

jsmeaton wrote: post #20
maxmcd wrote: post #2

I think I found another one, and it looks like it swapped twice: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Aesthetic.esthetic Edit: Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Archaeology.archeology A very early switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Toward.towards Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=catalogue.catalog And another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=centre.center A weaker one: http…

This is one I've been wondering about for awhile: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=cooperation.co-operati... I thought the change happened somewhere around the 80-90's. Guess it depends on the country also.

It is too bad it doesn't differentiate between cooperation and coöperation.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#32

Post by _delirium »

yxhuvud wrote: post #31
jsmeaton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one I've been wondering about for awhile: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=cooperation.co-operati... I thought the change happened somewhere around the 80-90's. Guess it depends on the country also.

It is too bad it doesn't differentiate between cooperation and coöperation.

Google's version includes coöperation, but it has negligible usage: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cooperation%2C...

On the other hand it's possible OCR is missing some of those ¨ and screwing up the data.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#33

Post by _delirium »

jsmeaton wrote: post #20
maxmcd wrote: post #2

I think I found another one, and it looks like it swapped twice: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Aesthetic.esthetic Edit: Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Archaeology.archeology A very early switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Toward.towards Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=catalogue.catalog And another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=centre.center A weaker one: http…

This is one I've been wondering about for awhile: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=cooperation.co-operati... I thought the change happened somewhere around the 80-90's. Guess it depends on the country also.

The Google Books dataset suggests the crossover point was around 1905 in AmE, but not until the late 1970s in BrE (modulo the usual caveats about how their data isn't necessarily a representative sample):

AmE: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cooperation%2C...

BrE: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cooperation%2C...

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#34

Post by levosmetalo »

_delirium wrote: post #30
pacaro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first of these is still spelled æsthetic in some places. The general convention in US spelling of replacing æ and œ with e seems more jarring to me than other differences in orthography between US and commonwealth English I can't run the nytlabs thing because a) windows phone, and b) when I try to enter æ I get another character... (potentially see (a))

It's typically spelled aesthetic in American English nowadays (without the ligature). In that one the NYT was a hold-out in the other direction: esthetic never overtook aesthetic in general American usage, though for a period in the 20th century it looked like it might ( encyclopedia did definitively displace encyclopaedia ). It looks like the NYT wholesale made the ae->e switch around 1920, and then in the case of a…

Seems like US English was bussy replacing German umlaut characters ä, ö, ü (transcribed in ascii as ae, oe, ue) with americanized version.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#35

Post by _delirium »

levosmetalo wrote: post #34
_delirium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's typically spelled aesthetic in American English nowadays (without the ligature). In that one the NYT was a hold-out in the other direction: esthetic never overtook aesthetic in general American usage, though for a period in the 20th century it looked like it might ( encyclopedia did definitively displace encyclopaedia ). It looks like the NYT wholesale made the ae->e switch around 1920, and then in the case of a…

Seems like US English was bussy replacing German umlaut characters ä, ö, ü (transcribed in ascii as ae, oe, ue) with americanized version.

These words aren't German borrowings, so that isn't related at all. The ae in this class of words is from Latin æ (ultimately from Greek αι). The ae->e shift was an attempt at spelling simplification, to remove some vestigial Latinisms, but only partially succeeded.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#36

Post by stan_rogers »

DanBC wrote: post #27
SixSigma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=istanbul.constantinopl... This was by edict "The international name Constantinople also remained in use until the Turkish Postal Service Law of March 28, 1930, according to which all foreign countries were asked to solely use the name Istanbul also in their languages and their postal service networks."

Compare that to Myanmar / Burma, who also ask people to use the Myanmar form. Since it's not a democratic government there is some resistance to the new name. http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=burma.myanmar

There was resistance to Istanbul as well; the hit song Istanbul (Not Constantinople) dates from 1953.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#37

Post by paul_f »

SixSigma wrote: post #14
maxmcd wrote: post #2

I think I found another one, and it looks like it swapped twice: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Aesthetic.esthetic Edit: Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Archaeology.archeology A very early switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Toward.towards Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=catalogue.catalog And another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=centre.center A weaker one: http…

http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=istanbul.constantinopl... This was by edict "The international name Constantinople also remained in use until the Turkish Postal Service Law of March 28, 1930, according to which all foreign countries were asked to solely use the name Istanbul also in their languages and their postal service networks."

Surely I'm not the only one who instantly thought of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsRuurcTTSk

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#38

Post by icantthinkofone »

As an aside, my web dev company runs about 10 web sites for theatre companies and all of them spell their names ending in 're' while the venues they play at spell their names ending in 'er'.

The first time we signed up one of these companies, I asked about the spelling and was given the same history as outlined in the article. With the second company that signed us, we mis-typed theatre and were taken to the woodshed for making the error.

So we are used to spelling it as theatre in the correct use of the word and are surprised the NY Times has not for many years.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#39

Post by pessimizer »

DanBC wrote: post #26
snogglethorpe wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tokyo" replaced "Tokio" in about 1930: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=tokyo.tokio ["Tokyo" is somewhat closer to the Japanese pronunciation] "Muslim" replaced "moslem" in about 1988: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=moslem.muslim [Apparently for good reason: http://hnn.us/article/524 ] "Peking" was replaced by "Peiping" in 1930, but it was back to "Peking" in 1962, and then finally changed to "Beijing" i…

Constantinople vs Istanbul shows a nice clean switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=constantinople.istanbu... Burma vs Myanmar is messier http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=burma.myanmar

That one is a bit controversial because 'Burma' was changed to 'Myanmar' by the military dictatorship.

Re: “Theater” vs. “Theatre”: The Great New York Times Language Swap

#40

Post by icantthinkofone »

rmason wrote: post #29
marjwyatt wrote: post #19

I was just puzzling about this the other day. I live in the USA and I've always spelled the word as theatre. Only recently, I've noticed that spellcheck is balking at this. It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong and I don't really mind that my country wants to spell it differently.

I've always used theatre myself. I always believed that it depended largely on when you first encountered the word in school. If you came of age in the fifties or sixties that was the common spelling of the word. I can even remember movie theatres, pre multiplexes spelling it that way. If you're younger and spell it as theatre then you're an Anglophile;<).

If a movie theater spelled it as 're' then that was wrong. I think you are mis-remembering.
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