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Flavor vs. Flavour
An anonymous reader writes "A recent flamewar ensued on the Linux kernel mailing list, this time debating the proper spelling of 'flavor', or is it 'flavour'? Even Linux creator Linus Torvalds joined the fray with some rather humorous comments. For the most part, it sounds like spellings will stay as they are, but it makes for an entertaining read."
Is it just me, or is that not a flamewar at all? Flamewars are all-out textual brawls; this appears to be some mild discussion with the most offensive line of text referring to being born in the US as 'unfortunate'. And after that outbreak, the situation mostly resolved itself.
OH NO! HNNGG! BURRRN! TAKE THAT! These guys are obviously flame-war masters, with the powers to bring forth Derek Smart levels of binary cacophony.
I just have to say, this is possibly the saddest thing I've ever seen posted to /. in the 2 years I've been coming here. Is this TRULY the only news we have to post? A semantic debate over one alternate spelling?
(-1, Troll...)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
In fact correct: the US form is "curb".
International English follows the British spelling. We Americans should just grin and bear it, and accept the fact that our "English" is nonstandard. (Like Microsoft's implementation of Java, perhaps) In any case, if your target audience is wider than the US (and maybe Japan as the English they use there tends toward American), it is best to use the international spellings - colour, flavour - than our utterly made up spellings. (Damn you Noah Webster! It's all your fault! No, seriously.) I think people gravitate to the US spelling because they are simpler, but they are not more correct. But no one else here in the US is likely to agree with me; I'm probably going to get modded (-1, Flamebait) for this one. Heh.
In short, we should just accept that our English is nonstandard, and use the English every other English-speaking country uses.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
As a Brit working in the US, I have this debate over colour vs color all the time.
There is a resolution to it. The 'recognised' standard for American English is Websters - and it allows both flavor and flavour (and color and colour). The recognised standard for British English is the Oxford English dictionary - and it recognises ONLY flavour and colour.
Hence, the most compatible choice is Flavour and Colour since those should be recognisable on both sides of the atlantic where Flavor and Color are most definitely mis-spellings of British English.
Case solved!
www.sjbaker.org
"I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way."
flavor" is the common spellingCommon? Surely flavour would be the most common usage? I expect more people in the world use English rather than 'merican. Basically the American empire uses American (flavor) and the British Commonwealth (inc India) uses English (flavour).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Someone got into the habit of spelling beere as beer. Before you know it over time it became known as beer.
My point is that english is always changing and both the American and English versions today are correct. A century and a half of isolation is what caused the American drift in standard english. Today because of television, education, and the internet, Britian and the US are knitted back together.
Infact English is still changing thanks to the internet. The way we use nouns as adjuctives for technical slang is changing it some more.
http://saveie6.com/
Uh... there is something on the order of 506 million English speakers on Earth. Nearly everyone who lives outside of the USA who speaks the language writes English closer to the British orthography than they do to the American.
This doesn't make either "standard" per se, but, since the study of language is the study of trends, it's safe to say the trend in English is toward a British style of spelling and not an American one.
(I mean, not all of those countries follow exactly the British. Canada, for instance, is about half/half American/British--words like "fetus" & "maneuver" in the American style, with words like "centre" and "colour" and "theatre" in the British).
It's not a case of "which was around earlier", it's a case of "what do the British use? Let's not use that". They could do no worse than the old English that the English themselves had discarded.
The reason most USian words are around earlier is because they're from pre-Norman Britain. We modified our language to be more pallatable to the Gallic nobles running the country, e.g. adopting the prefix -our over -or, -re over -er, -ise over -ize, and so on.
Let's use "centre" as an example. The French pronounce and spell it -re ("son-tre" for centre). The US prounounce and spell it -er ("sen-ter" for center). We Brits pronounce it -er and spell it -re.
In case you're wondering, center/centre is from the Latin centrum, so the French were right.
Does my bum look big in this?
It's also the same kind of thinking that has led to English's dominant position. The fact that it cheerfully absorbs words from outside sources meant that it was able to evolve. English is a 'living' language. If enough people use a word in a certain way, it becomes the accepted meaning.
In contrast, the French language institute is so uptight about preserving the 'integrity' of the French language that it comes up with 'correct' terminology e.g. 'courriel' for 'e-mail'.
Yeah, but if you go down that route, where do you stop? There are two main schools of thought in linguistics - those who believe in a prescriptive role for the study of language (i.e. grammar books dictate what is correct and what is not) and those who believe it should have a more descriptive role (i.e. it describes what is actually in use). Now, if we take the descriptive model to then dictate what is and isn't correct, at what point does one stop subdividing the language into dialects, argots, slang forms, idiolects and so on? What is incorrect in formal business American English in New York may be perfectly fine in the dialect of the Hispanic American living in L.A. - and what is correct in formal business American English may be unspeakable incorrect in formal British English as spoken by the Queen. The only way you can hope to say definitively what is right and what is wrong is by specifying exactly who the speaker/writer is, what their social and cultural background is, and also *when* they spoke or wrote what they did - as language changes dynamically all the time, and cross-pollinates from one area to another.