Nationstatelandsville wrote:Olthar wrote:Actually, historically speaking, it's pretty much the opposite. See, back in the day, there was no "official" spelling for any words, so English had tons of alternate spellings for many words. For instance, color and colour were both accepted spellings. Then, a guy named Webster came along and invented the dictionary. Being a practical sort of guy, he wanted to make Engliah more phonetic and easy. Thus, he picked the simpler versions of these words and dropped the unnecessary letters. However, Webster happened to be American, so the British intentionally adopted the overly-complicated spellings just to troll him. Then they collectively did a bit of historical revisionism and pretended that the complex spellings were right all along and that America "bastardized" them, even though our spellings were all originally theirs. They made life harder on themselves just to play out a petty prank.
Samuel Johnson's dictionary predates Webster's by 73 years, having some out in 1755 whilst Webster's did in 1828.
Bah. Trite garbage and guesswork masquerading as fact. Inconsistent spellings, confusing pronunciations, and erroneous etymology. It's only real value was in providing a uniform structure. The actual content was laughably worthless. It's like buying what appears to be a car, but then finding out that the engine is just a few sticks held together by masking tape.
I'm proud, as an Australian, to be part of a global centuries-old linguistic prank on the world's present day superpower, before pranking them was even cool
