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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."
It's a light flamewar, they are just less explicit about it... (Eg. "Fucking" vs. "Having Sex")
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The issue of American spelling of various words, has been of great interest to me this year, as I simultaneously start to write my PhD thesis and also learn the German language.
I live in New Zealand, yes one of those countries colonised by the great British empire. Here of course we write with the British spelling (ie. English spelling used by the rest of the world). However this is under threat from the ever prevalent American spelling, mostly due to the internet, and things like Microsoft Word and e-mail spell checkers defaulting to the US spelling (Yes I know how to change it but very many people do not - Actually I use LaTeX so this is a moot point for me). Teachers used to mark this alternative spelling quite harshly, but now I feel they are giving up.
This raised a few issues, for me mostly when I find information on the internet I am conscious to try with both spellings. I got caught out in Bugzilla with this.
Interestingly the changes the US have made to the language not only include spelling changes, But also grammatical. An example is "to dream" the American is: "dreamed" whilst the British is: "dreamt". These grammatical differences are seen in all American movies and TV shows shown around the world.
I am not American bashing in any way, but these issues are non-trivial.
hasn't france outlawed calling email "email"?
Up here in Canada, centre is the noun, and center is the verb.
So The Medical Centre, and you center your sights on a target.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Agreed,
George Bernard Shaw one wrote
"England and America are two countries divided by a common language"
Never a truer word.
Not too bad, what was real fun was coding with my best friend, way back in grade 11 with pascal... He has an easier time working with var names that are not descriptive but just plaid different and can be logical units in your head. It was small code so we could bacially keep track of everything in our heads... but having lines of code that read:
if ( pig > cow ) then horse;
makes for fun codeing.. and a global search and replace right before handing it in makes for good marks... heh(that and the fact that we taught more of the class then the teacher, but she still did a good job with the other students, it's just that there were more of us then her)
I suspect multiple spellings of the same word would have the opposite effect, and i have had issues with it just lately while working with some toolkits that don't use standardized spellings...
I like the solution some have thou, just define the function twice with the same name! If you got the mem for that, it solves a few problems...
Anyway, enough of my ranting...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
I can't remember exactly who said it, but a linguiast once said that a "Standard language is just a dialect with an army."
The "flavour/flavor" variation was part of an attempt by Noah Webster to simplify and make more consistent the spelling of words in the American dialect. One can argue whether the attempt was misguided or not, but it certainly hasn't been the only one. George Bernard Shaw also tried to make spelling more consistent (see the preface of his play "Pygmalion" for more detail).
Changing standardized (or standardised) spelling to make it more consistent is just one of those pastimes that occasionally crop up amongst speakers of English. For some reason it seems to crop up amongst the Brits more than the Yanks, I suppose because the British spellings are even more inconsistent than American, but in any event it seldom takes hold.
The standardized spellings, especially the British spellings, retain the history of how they used to be pronounced. You don't see the variation as much in other languages, say French or German for instance, because both of those languages were standardized much later than English. In fact, English was never really standardized at all. But the Brothers Grimm researched fairy tales in part to come up with a standardized version of German, and that is why German spelling is much more consistent than English. The French on the other hand set up an institute to standardize French under Napoleon.
So each of those two countries went through standardization processes for their respective languages in the early 19th century.
English on the other hand just... accumulated. The "first" dictionary was by Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. From there, the standard spellings were decided culturally, with whatever dictionary that was most fashionable at the time becoming the standard. In America, this was Webster's Dictionary. The British finally, sort of, standardized on the Oxford English Dictionary, but this was compiled mostly by scholars who were interested in the history of the language rather than reformers who would have tried to make it more consistent.
There certainly are reasons why the spelling of English should be made more consistent. I, for one, would love to see the death of the letter "k". It's useless, ugly, and inefficient. Just use "c" and change all the instances where "c" makes a sibilant es sound to "s". Use "z" always for the voiced es. Change all voiced instances of "th" to "dh". Change all initial instances of "ph" to "f". Change all instances of voiced "g" to "j", and all instances where "j" represents the dipthong "ie" to "y". And so on.
Those are just some obvious suggestions for making English spelling more consistent. None of them will happen of course. Whether they should is not a debate I want to get into here. I like being able to see the history of our language in its spelling varieties. I can also understand the desire for a more consistent representation of our language.
As for "flavour" and "flavor", neither spelling is more "correct" than the other. One simply reflects its historical provenance better, and the other its pronunciation. Variety is the spice of life. Pick your flavour (or flavor).
So does anyone find that the American spellings of these words are becoming more prevalent? One example I've always found interesting is the English billion vs the American billion. The english is 10^12, where the American billion is 10^9. It gets more screwy at trillion, where an English trillion is 10^18, while an American trillion is 10^12.
The point of mentioning this is that from what I've heard the American definitions of billion, trillion, etc are becoming more popular in the UK.
Being an American I've always thought the English definitions were inconsistant, since they have a seperate name for 10^0, 10^3, 10^6, but then suddenly start only giving seperate names at 10^6 intervals.
Obviously the spelling of flavour vs flavor is fairly irrelevant, and doesn't have the same issues as the definition of billion does. But I'm still curious if spellings have that same bleed-over factor.
AccountKiller
Now that we have that established, let me elaborate:
Back in the day when webster was starting out, we Americans has this little disagreement with the Brittish. You might recall that some things were changed just as a nice little #$@# off to the Commonwealth. Case in point: driving on the right side of the road (not to start a flame war, but economically and logically it doesn't make sense)
Well between Webster's desire to change the language himself, and the desire to reduce the number of letters in commonly used words (letters = money for printers) Webster started changing shit just cause he could.
At the point when Webster created his dictionary, the concept that there WAS such a thing as a "correct" spelling was just beginning to take hold.
For correct reason, see quote Robin Williams Live on Broadway 2002 in reference to a parallel situation: King James breaking away from Rome and starting the Anglican church:
"Ha ha! Whose the fucking pope now!"
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
First we spent years of time and hundreds of man-hours debating whether it was pronounced lie-nucks, lee-nuks, or li-nuks.
Now this.
If we all spent this time coding and debugging instead of debating crap like this that simply does not matter, Linux would be the first totally error and bug free OS on the planet.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Aluminium is an element, it was discovered, not "invented", and not by an American.
Aluminium history
"In 1809 [Sir Humphrey] Davy [English] fused iron in contact with alumina in an electric arc to produce an iron Aluminium alloy; for a split instant, before it joined the iron, Aluminium existed in its free metallic state for perhaps the first time since the world was formed"
Sir Humphrey Davy
"In 1825, Hans Christian Oersted [Danish] first successfully isolated aluminum in a pure form."
American chemists industrialised the process.
Canadian English, for example, seems to be primarily based on the British English, with a fair bit of US English influence, and even some Quebec French mixed in there. Incidentally, Quebec French is significantly different from the French spoken in France, and yet, most people can figure out what's being said.
I say, should we really care how variables are spelled as long as we get the point across? If I say flavour, and some American eejit has written flavor, I think we will both know what's going on, n'est-ce pas?
Alternatively we invent a NEW language for programming; one that has exactly one dialect and one correct usage. That'd remove all the confusion, especially if we went ahead and translated all previous code, keywords in programming languages, etc.... There's probably no language on the planet that meets this criteria yet, so we'd all have to learn a new language, but hey, that would be WAY easier than dealing with petty spelling differences, wouldn't it?
Of course I doubt the literacy of the rest of the 506 million is as high as 97%.
British spelling makes use of a consistent prefix-stem-suffix system to build words.
this makes it possible to work out general meanings of words if you don't know the exact definition.
consider:
centre
centripetal
centrifuge
--common stem "centr"
theatre
theatrical
--common stem "theatr"
the American spelling may seem simple, but it is very shallow. Individual words may be spelt more like how they sound (or seem to sound), but the relationships between words are lost.
consider the US spelling of "center" with the stem "cent"; this suggests a meaning to do with the number 100.
this is probably why the US comes up with retarded stuff like phonics?
I say lorry, and so do most other Brits that I know.
If you check Mr. Shakespeare's manuscripts, you'll find color, not colour,
As Shakespeare supposedly spelled his own name in 27 different ways (Shakespear, shakespere etc), I don't think he's a useful guide.
and the pronounciation and spelling of alumin(i)um (Brits "aluMINIum", Yanks "ALUminum") started out the American way, until those bloody English blokes started going continental on us for a while
It actually started as Alumium, but Sir Humphrey Davy (who first named it) for some reason then changed his mind and called it aluminum. The Brits (and as far as I understand, the rest of the English speaking world outside of the US) decided to use aluminium because it fitted better with everything else that he'd named (magnesium, barium, calcium etc).
And how can you argue that British English is getting more quaint (attractively old-fashioned) and then point out that the the US actually uses the old-fashioned spelling?
If you actually checked your facts before spouting off, you'd know that the discoverer of aluminium named it "alumium". The IUPAC then gave it the name "aluminium" to bring it into line with other elements (you know, sodium, potassium, etc. - gee, there doesn't seem to be any others that end in -num), and the US used this spelling until 1925 when the American Chemical Society had a fit of contrariness and decided to use "aluminum" (please note that the IUPAC spelling has always been aluminium).
Oh, by the way, if you check back before Shakespeare, centre, colour, etc. were spelled the right way. It's just that at the time the USA was formed, the irregular -or forms were in vogue.
I think grep and gcc need to be changed.
Just like case-insensitivity I think grep should have a non-strict English match setting. This could do a match on both colour and color if either is found.
Perhaps even an option on the compilers? (But this is more dangerous, and can be acompanied by compiler warnings...)
Diversity is a good thing, right?
I write and present for a living. My wife for works for an international Investment bank. We DO NOT live in either the US or UK. We live in Switzerland.
What is the English used? American English. My wife even had a document pop up in her email defining what language to use and what words to use. Lo and behold what language dominated? American English, even though the company was not American or British...
The reality is that American English is winning, even among those "common wealth" countires...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
From what I vaguely remember from the Bill Bryson book "Mother Tongue", the spelling of "colour" as "color" happened in Britain as well in the 18th century. There was a period where it was fashionable to try and "improve" the inconstistencies in English, and the supposedly stray extra vowel was dropped (even though the pronunciation of the first syllable differs to the second - it's more like kull-err). This was, more or less, at the time of the American War of Independence, and after that point the two languages diverged, with the then-current British reductionist fashion holding sway - maybe, in a tiny way, to affirm a linguistic independence from the former colonial power's historical spellings.
Anyhoo - I'm an English (British/European/whatever) web developer of over 8 years and am so indoctrinated with the Americanisms of HTML and its ilk, that when it comes to programming or anything computer related, the spelling of "colour" now appears incorrect, at least with a programmer's hat on. These are, after all, merely symbols to the compiler or intepreter, so their actual spelling is largely irrelevant, as long as it remains consistent throughout the project in question. I would think that the worldwide geek nation must surely consider "color" (when used for code, but not neccessarily comments) to be the de-facto standard by now, or at least anyone who has used a programming language of any sort in the last 20 years probably would...
It's too late for me to die young
which I started in the Redhat mailing list back when someone had a query over why Redhat defaulted to A4 over US Letter, then it spawned into:
A4 vs. US Letter
A-looo-me-num vs. Ala-min-e-um
240v vs. 110v
-our vs -or
Driving on the right vs. Driving on the left
New Zealand Accent vs. Australian Accent
"The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting" - Woody Allen