The ‘-ize’ have it (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The ‘-ize’ have it (2012)

metadyne.co.uk

98 pointsLammy149 comments

I decided that I would use ‘ize’ endings about 23 years ago, and I was in good company as many newspapers did so too. Oxford Spelling, as it is known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling) has fallen out of favour in domestic use, but is still found in international use, as my own observation.

On my own choice, I felt that there were not enough ‘Z’s in everyday writing, and that it was too good a letter to ignore.

It is bloody annoying that device dictionaries do not support this. I have occasionally switched to US English but this is not quite right. Knowing the correct suffix is a bit of a minefield.

Some of the international use might be because the United Nations uses Oxford spelling [1]. My employer does too.

GNU Aspell has several variants of "British English", including "British English (United Kingdom) [-ize suffixes and with accents]". KDE seems to use the same dictionary, so in KDE applications I have full support for "Oxford spelling".

There's a Firefox extension which includes -ize endings, but also includes -ise endings, so it's less useful.

[1] http://dd.dgacm.org/editorialmanual/ed-guidelines/style/spel...

[2] http://aspell.net/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/british-engli...

Not all of the ise/ize endings are interchangable, so the Firefox extension might be correct. -ize is only applicable for words with a Greek root, I believe, which is why choosing Oxford English was hardly a masterstroke on my part but it does make things more interesting.

I have little experience of Aspell short of seeing it pop up as a dependency now and then, but I will now try and attempt incorporating it into my Mac's dictionary, ideally it would work on iOS as well.

The Firefox extension includes both versions, so I see a red underline for advertize (usage is archaic), but not for either realize or realise.

  aspell -d en_GB-ize-w_accents list < file-to-check

is the command to merely list spelling errors.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) uses British English too.

I have occasionally switched to US English but this is not quite right.

You might try Canadian English. It mostly uses -ize, but still retains -our in colour, honour, et cetera. There remain a few things that are more American than British (such as tire and aluminum), but it is probably a lot closer to what you are looking for.

Neato. I actually tried Australian English for a while, but let me do the switcheroo to Canadian and see.

Australian would have been counterproductive, as there was a time when it could be said Australia uses -ise; Britain prefers -ize and America use -ize.

Nowadays I have no idea if there'r any distiction - maybe just permitting one to spell “program” correctly?

Before computer dictionaries one Australian newspaper used “color, -ise” as its spelling which I find preferable.

> On my own choice, I felt that there were not enough ‘Z’s in everyday writing, and that it was too good a letter to ignore.

This made me smile, thanks! As a Brit I've always liked that English is very well described, but as equally is open to individual interpretation and expression. I've personally tried to carve out my own wee expressions and twists over the years and wish to encourage my daughter to do the same when her time comes... my only concern there is how that will play with her English teachers!

Me too, it's really annoying to have autocorrect keep trying to switch it to an s, even though it's perfectly correct.

The Z being rare only adds to it's character.

*its, no possessive apostrophe required - like "his" and "her :)

I used to correct people who made this error, but I've stopped since realizing my phone's autocorrect sneakily turns its to it's every damn time regardless of the context.

What type of phone? As for my iPhone, it’s in better command of its senses, for I typed this sentence on it without manually adding or removing apostrophes.

Android's keyboard is just another app, and is easily changed, including by the manufacturer.

SwiftKey works very well for me (and came installed on a Sony phone). Sometimes people comment that it flips between both dansk og engelsk very smoothly, which is useful when throwing a name or address like "Jesper lives on Christianshavns Torv, København" into an English sentence.

*"her", quotation marks should come in pairs. :)

Whenever I come across these quirks, I can't help but think of how extremely codified the grammar of Sanskrit(and other Indian languages that are influenced by it) is to handle situations like this.

Visarga Sandhi is one example comes to my mind. It is primarily used to handle the negative cases. For example, devoid of people is 'Nirjan' which is built using 'Nih'(No) and 'Jan'(People), whereas 'Nishchal' which means devoid of motion comes from 'Nih'(No) and 'Chal'(Motion). I'm not exactly sure but the rule probably goes along the lines of - When amalgamating "Uh" sound with Hard Sounds(Ka, Cha, Ta, Tha, Pa) you add a 'Sh' sound as in Nishkalmash, Nishchal, Nishchinth etc whereas when amalgamating with Soft sounds(Ga, Ja, Da, Dha, Ba) you add a 'Rr' sound as in Nirbhay, Nirday etc.

You have hundreds of these rules that deal with all kinds of transformations, sometimes simple rules like Ka => Ga, Cha => Ja etc. and sometimes more complex rules which are conditional on the consonant sounds that precede the object of transformation(Namah + Te => Namaste). Lot of them feel arbitrarily imposed but they just feel right when you say them out aloud.

Here are a couple of examples involving vowel transformations.

Mahaa(Great) + Indra(Lord) => Mahendra(Great Lord) (aa(as in car) + e(as in kick) => ae(as in vent))

Mahi(Earth) + Indra(Lord) => Mahindra(Lord of Earth) (e(as in kick) + e(as in kick) => ee(as in screen))

In fact the -ise ending is pronounced with a 'z' sound because of French spelling rules, but since most English speaking people don't learn French spelling rules they don't realise the etymology and hence (not henka) the spelling. The rule in its most basic form is either an 'i' or an 'e' before or after and 's' changes the sound to a 'z'. In a similar way and 'i' or an 'e' before or after a 'c' changes it into an 's' sound; this is why France is spelt France but Francaise is spelt Française, the cédille is there to remind you that the base word has a 'e' after the 'c'. So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

When I was in primary school I was taught basic French, German, Latin and Greek spelling and etymology so that spelling in English would make more sense (not senze!)

> So one could say that the '-ize' ending may have a more Germanic feel to it. In a similar way "metre" versus "meter".

although one shouldn't, since West Germanic didn't have a z sound or a letter to spell it with - it had become r (hence was/were, where “was” originally had an s sound and were originally had a z sound).

Later, when Germanic languages developed z again, it has mostly been spelt with s as in “was”, since it comes from s.

In English no matter the origin of the word, z is spelt s in core vocabulary. Borrowings from Greek have z but they are mostly learned. If there were no zoos, z would feel entirely odd.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing. Here's an interesting tidbit that might be of interest to you. Indic Scripts and some Ethiopean scripts fall under what are referred to as Abugida writing systems [0]. These essentially eliminate the need to memorize(or devise rules for) spellings and the need for a separate phonetic alphabet. Consonants are combined with vowels(using diacritics etc.) to generate units of syllables providing a one to one mapping between sounds and syllabic units.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

> On the whole the ‘z’ alternative has nothing whatever to do with America

I was told that using a 'z' is old-fashioned, and using it or an 's' is optional - just be consistent. Only recently have I noticed a trend to condemn it as 'American', and if anything is sure to bring out a rather nasty, old-fashioned snob in some English people, it's being 'American'. Personally I cringe at this and quite happily use the 'z' form.

On the subject of anti-American snobbery, one of my friends whom I have known for over 30 years was adopted by a very old-fashioned English couple and (sure enough) often had a disparaging word about anything American. When he was about 20, his natural father made contact with him ... from America! After things had settled down a bit and he had met his 'new' family, I put it to him that, you know what, you are basically an American now. Foolish to pretend otherwise. He's changed his view quite a bit since then :)

>Only recently have I noticed a trend to condemn it as 'American', and if anything is sure to bring out a rather nasty, old-fashioned snob in some English people, it's being 'American'.

Similarly, until 1980 "soccer" and "football" were interchangeably used in Britain (http://ns.umich.edu/Releases/2014/June14/Its-football-not-so...), when "soccer" became less popular because of a mistaken belief that it is an Americanism. Not class reasons, as often claimed; this would be news to the millions who watch Soccer Saturday and Soccer AM.

In the English-speaking world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#National_usage , "football" is only unambiguously association football in Great Britain. In Ireland, "football" = Gaelic football or rugby union, and "soccer" is frequently used. In Australia, "football" = rugby, rugby league, or Australian rules. In New Zealand, "football" = rugby or association football. In South Africa, association football is called "soccer" as often as in the US. In Canada, "football" = American or Canadian football. In other words, among English speakers Brits are outnumbered—whether by population or number of major English-speaking countries—in terms of how they use "football".

(Italy uses "calcio", which means "kick". Yet, for some strange reason Italians never ever get criticized for not calling the sport "football" or some other language's variant of that word, nor do self-loathingly pretentious Italians feel the need to call the sport by its "correct" name; strange, that.)

> In Ireland, "football" = Gaelic football or rugby union, and "soccer" is frequently used.

Not really. Football means soccer, people normally say "GAA" to mean Gaelic football (its an acronym, Gaelic athletics association). The word soccer isn't used much. Source: I'm Irish.

> Italy uses "calcio", which means "kick". Yet, for some strange reason Italians never ever get criticized for not calling the sport "football"

As Italian, I can explain you why we use calcio and not football

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino

At school in England in the 90s we alternated between (among others) 'rugby football' (aka rugby) and 'soccer' in games lessons.

I've never heard 'soccer ball' though. 'rugby ball' and 'football'.

"Soccer ball" sounds perfectly natural to me (also English).

I wondered about that 'soccer' thing as well. It was always perfectly good English when I was growing up, and at school we used it to distinguish the game from rugby.

The origin myth I heard was along the lines of 'I don't want to play rugger, but I do fancy a game of assoc-er' where it was an attempted play on words with 'association football' by someone at an independent school. I doubt the truth of this, but anyway...

Not a play on words. Soccer's etymology exactly comes from as"soc"iation football.

Wiki's wording is a little confusing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)#Etymology), but I believe they're saying that soccer comes from association football, but crediting that term to Charles Wreford-Brown can't be substantiated.

That may be true, but try making Italian food with non-standard ingredients and the pedantry comes out in full force.

Here's a 40k member Facebook group dedicated to just that

https://www.facebook.com/groups/2110370665911902/?ref=share

> but try making Italian food with non-standard ingredients and the pedantry comes out in full force

for very good reasons :)

American is old fashioned English, so those are basically the same thing.

I'm afraid that's a common myth. For starters, there isn't really an objective measure of how conservative or old-fashioned a language is. But even subjectively, there's not really a reason to perceive American English as more old-fashioned.

All dialects randomly conserve and innovate on features. And when a dialect is split off by, in those case, geography, they will start to conserve and innovate different features. And it's true that American English conserved rhoticity which was lost in most of England, but it did innovate e.g. /æ/-raising where British English conserved the original pronunciation. But that's just two of many more features, and neither geographical region clearly conserved more than the other.

> All dialects randomly conserve and innovate on features.

Saying that there are no intelligible reasons for any feature change of a language in any dialect, (i.e. that they are all random) is a strong claim.

Fortunately it is not a claim in the text you quoted. If a change is necessary, it has already happened everywhere. So neither t-flapping nor th-fronting are necessary, but both are more likely than [t] > [k]. There is no specific reason that one of them advanced through one country and the other spread through another, even if there is a good reason the third change hasn't happened. Or equivalently with the abandonment of “reckon” vs the substitution of “autumn” for “fall”.

Could you expand on that? Do you mean that they are predictable or possibly artificially steered?

In mainstream linguistics sound changes are assumed to be random. Some are more common than others of course, but there's no saying what sound change will happen in English next.

That may be more true than most realize.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

Except we did a spelling reform.

That’s amazing. Do you remember what went into the reform, whether you had to convince many people, and your personal feelings at the time?

That happened in the 1800s and very early 1900s. US dictionary makers favored phonetic reform. -IZE has been standard since the 1920s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

The difficulty with phonetic spelling reforms is that you quickly run into the problem of words being pronounced markedly different in different dialects in different regions, and you inevitably end up trying to declare on dialect standard and the rest wrong. Granted, the sort of people into this reform are usually happy to declare their dialect obviously correct and demand everyone else get in line.

The last time this came up on HN, the comment thread already disagreed on whether "mention" should be spelled "menchin", "menshin", "menchun", or "menshun".

A spelling reform could keep “mention” and still significantly improve the orthography were it to simply apply the rules more consistently. And when words are genuinely different, like “ask” or “of” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

a spelling reform cud[] keep “mention” and still significantly improov the orthography wer it to simply aply the rules more consistently. And when wurds ar genuinely different, like “ask/aask” or “uv/ov” it's not going to hurt to spell them differently.

[] although how to spell put/putt is an open question. here I have sided with northerners and decided to spell them the same.

... are you suggesting that every English dialect spell its words differently, so that we no longer have a written common language? That Americans spell "were" "wur" and Brits spell it "wuh", so that when I read a sentence written in a book I have to know or puzzle out the accent of the person who wrote it?

[As an aside, why did you drop the doubled "p" from "apply" but not the doubled "f" from "different" or the doubled "l" from "spell"?]

The only place I happen upon -ize in my own usage is because all the Web browsers I use come with default English (US) spellercheckers.

And as an Australian English snob with some mental health issues, it drives me crazy!

Alternative pov that may help your snobbery: There is not yet an Australian English standard; it is just British. Therefore, Australians are free to create our own standard using parts of the existing standards or innovations of our own.

In particular, you are not propagating our own tradition by strictly adhering to so-called Australian spellings, which are really British spellings. On the contrary, you are declaring linguistic subordination. At this stage, the best option is tolerance of diversity, not snobbery.

If you look at an American book that has an edition produced by an Australia publisher, it may have American spellings, but most Australian editions (i.e. British editions, since their publishers claim Australia as a dependency) use British spelling.

> you are basically an American now.

Always has been.

Well this is intensely disappointing. I shall have to find something else to be snobby about - I feel like I have been living a lie, I have spent countless hours changing the dictionary in windows or osx to be UK English just so it didn't correct me on this. What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?

> What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?

Long and short number scales?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Is "billion" a thousand million (10^9) or a million million (10^12)? Numberphile video:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ&t=5m30s

TL;DR: billion = bi-million = two of 10^6 = 10^{6x2} = 10^12. trillion = tri-million = 10^{6x3} = 10^18, and not 10^12. quadrillion, pent….

In spanish (at least in es-ES), billion is a million million, which is really annoying when you see clear translation errors. Often, a reporter will read a billion here or there in an english source, and leave it as is, bringing an order of magnitud error into the translated news article. This is especially annoying when that error makes its way into other opinion pieces comparing budgets in the billions and trillions where the author is completely oblivious to the fact that they're mistaken because of a translation error upstream.

That is a massive problem especially when as you say when talking about political budgets.

Yes I like this. I haven't gone there and I may end up with no friends but I feel I may start correcting others on their incorrect definitions on billions.

What's the point of the long scale? The numbers seem impractically large for anything other than science (which uses scientific notation, anyway). The only other time I've really seen "quadrillion" actually used is in with the Zimbabwe dollar.

> What's the point of the long scale?

Conversely, plenty of languages continue to use long scale as the standard numbering system, and it used to be standard in English. Other cultures and languages use different systems altogether.

So, let's rephrase the question.

What's the point of the short scale?

You have ignored the questioner's question. Why?

The fact that something has always been done is not a reason to do it again.

> You have ignored the questioner’s question. Why?

First, I have not ignored the question. My answer to the question is right there is in my dissection and rephrasing of the question.

Second, the question as asked doesn’t make sense. Number scales are arbitrary; there is no ‘point’ for any one scale over another. Long, short, Chinese, Indian — so long as your interlocutor understands what you mean in the language and culture in which you’re speaking, neither has any more point than another.

Which is basically what my comment said, and plenty of people have thus far been able to interpret that without me needing to explain such.

> What's the point of the long scale?

AFAICT, the long scale was the original one. It was the short scale that was "invented" later, so the question should be: why was the short scale created?

A lot of germanic and romanic countries just change the ending, so Million*1000 = Milliard and the Billion and Billiard, etc. Now I could be wrong about this, but I think it might have been part of Napoleons norming efforts.

There's no reason to switch to the short scale, that's the reason I guess.

On the contrary, I feel this opens up whole new areas for snootiness - some years ago a colleague jokingly berated me via group email for my ‘American spelling’ and my riposte was the Wikipedia entry for Oxford Spelling which put an end to that skirmish.

I like it, it's a double down on snootiness! It's not over!

Here's something else to get worked up about. One overcorrection I often see (even elsewhere in these comments) is "focussed". This is an attempt to avoid the American tenancy never to double consonants in words with the "ed" ending, but it's not correct in British English to always double the consonant. Instead, the rule is too double the letter when the last syllable is stressed, so "focussed" would sound like foCUSSED whereas the normal pronunciation is FOcused. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.

My intuition was that the doubling of the consonant was to prevent the modifying effect that the e would normally have. For example bat->batted. Bated doesn’t work because it looks like it should be pronounced the same as baited.

This makes sense. If I didn't already know the word, I could see mistakenly pronouncing “focused” to rhyme with “accused” (i.e. fohk-YOO-zed )

Not spelling, but my wife (Canadian) and I (American) recently had an interesting discussion about the placement of a comma following a quoted portion of a sentence. Americans are commonly taught the comma /always/ goes before the closing quotation marks, whereas in British English it depends on the context. You know it's a good weekend discussion when the Chicago Manual of Style gets involved.

I can't remember where I read this, but punctuation is placed before the closing quote because it looks nicer, and some of this might be because of typewriting and fixed-width fonts. Two spaces after a sentence is also a carryover from typewriters. Meanwhile, programming culture and its regular grammars is creeping into written language, and we're seeing punctuation follow quotes more often.

It's interested how technologies of the time affect grammar and language.

The opposite story I head was the the Chinese invented movable type before the West, but it's a lot less practical for languages without an alphabet.

This is suitably obscure. Do you mean inverted commas or a comma?

I think it's something along the lines of:

"Hacker News is," he said, "a website." (American)

vs.

"Hacker News is", he said, "a website". (British)

We Americans are taught to always put punctuation inside the quotation marks, with a few limited exceptions.

I gather our cousins across the sea are taught not to do this.

It's started to bleed into my own writing given the international nature of the teams I work with.

as an american, i never liked the inside rule, although it does "look right" to me from being taught it all through school.

the comma is not part of the quote, so it shouldn't be inside, typographical systems be damned. i tend to put it outside, to the horror of (american) grammar snobs everywhere. i think programming is what got me to seriously reconsider the placement.

I read long ago that the American convention comes from an old printing press limitation and flowed into writing too. This answer [1] on English StackExchange has some details. I’m sure many other sites have written about this in detail.

[1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150703/why-is-th...

Seems implausible to me. As one of the replies indicates, most periods at the end of lines won’t follow a quote, so this solution doesn’t work there.

Worse, it only applies to lines ending in a period. Those are extremely rare because hand-set lines typically ended with filler, in order to make all lines in a block of text equal length. See for example https://letterpresscommons.com/setting-type-by-hand/: “ As you are setting your line of type and finish the last word of the line, you’ll need to fill out the rest of your line with word spacing material”

I also would think most exclamation marks would not be wider than periods and commas. Why, then, are those typically rendered outside closing quotation marks?

https://faqs.cs.uu.nl/na-dir/alt-usage-english-faq.html says

“According to William F. Phillips (wfp@world.std.com), in the days when printing used raised bits of metal, "." and "," were the most delicate, and were in danger of damage (the face of the piece of type might break off from the body, or be bent or dented from above) if they had a '"' on one side and a blank space on the other. Hence the convention arose of always using '."' and ',"' rather than '".' and '",', regardless of logic.”

I don’t see obvious objections to that explanation.

The inside comma never made sense to me. Plus if you consider the quotation marks, the commas themselves almost seem redundant.

Yeah basically. I'm still not entirely clear what the British rules are.

Generally, whatever the rulers say.

Thanks that makes it clear yes I was taught outside (from Australia) and I didn't know there was an inside rule, I must look out for that in the novel I'm reading

"What other spelling idiosyncrasies are there that I can get on my high horse about?"

Not spelling, but I prefer the way of referring to brackets in the UK. It's simpler and logical:

() = brackets

[] = square brackets

{} = curly brackets

In the US:

() = parentheses (what a mouthful :-)

[] = brackets

{} = braces

I've heard "square brackets" here in the US.

I'd also use the term "curly braces" over just "braces" but either is acceptable.

I thought "<" was for "bra" and ">" for "ket", so "<>" for bra(c)kets?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra%E2%80%93ket_notation

That's an obscure scientific notation in a specific field. Very few native speakers will be familiar with it.

< and > are less-than and greater-than, or angle brackets if the real angle brackets are unavailable.

<> = angle brackets

(At least that's the UK usage I'm familiar with)

Really? I would have identified "angle brackets" as ⟨⟩.

Yes, those are angle brackets but they are not listed on an ASCII keyboard so most people use the < (less than) and > (greater than) symbols and these are still referred to as angle brackets (for example when referring to HTML or XML tags).

There is a difference between how brackets are referred to in mathematics[1] vs usage in written everyday English: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AngleBracket.html

[1] Another interesting difference between UK and US English:

UK = Maths (shorthand for mathematics)

US = Math

"parens" / pəˈrɛnz /

How about webpages that flow their text across multiple columns?

Very impressive text justification / linebreaking algorithm though. I didn't know FrontPage could do that!

  <meta content="Microsoft FrontPage 12.0" name="GENERATOR" />

There's a longstanding and widely implemented CSS working draft for columnar text, that even IE 10 apparently supports. No idea if this page is actually using it, since I'm not going upstairs just to pull up this page and poke around its stylesheet, but I could imagine Expression Web (aka Frontpage 12) making it available.

edit: Being upstairs anyway for other reasons, I've just had a look. It's just two <div> elements as columns in an old-school grid style system that predates CSS Grid. Text is flowed within the columns using a text-align: justify; rule, so the impressiveness of the result is properly credited to the browser rather than the site design.

I just use:

    <p style="columns:3;">

Yes, that's specified in the WD I mentioned. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-multicol-1/

I'm sorry. Thank you for pointing it out.

You've nothing for which to apologize that I can see! If anything, I was unduly curt, and I'm sorry for that.

My English spelling idiosyncrasy pet peeve is how correlation is spelled with two 'r's and one 'l' but corollary is spelled with one 'r' and two 'l's

It might be completely useless, but that has an etymological reason. Correlation derives from con + relation, where the n assimilated to the following r. On the other hand, corollary ultimately derives from corona with some diminutive suffix containing a double l.

Neat!

And topical, double points!

tire vs tyre - apparently “tire” is older, but when pneumatic tyres became a thing, the spelling “tyre” caught on in England. So that's not an option.

kerb vs curb (n) - again, curb is older, but somehow a spelling error^W varient caught on in England. In this case, it is unfortunate since Scottish people allegedly pronounce “curb” but write “kerb” (they pronounce ur like u+r and er like e+r, not as a single sound). So this one is not just not an option, it's actively hostile to many British peoplee

-or vs -our: unless you will spell governour and use other like spellings, you have no historical leg to stand on so you might as well allow both variants.

program is the older spelling, programme is preferred by those who are jealous of the French.

I never understood the logic of swapping -re to -er in theatre, centre tho. I mean, why only -re but not -le? why don't Americans tickel and cuddel? Surely the logic is the same. So I think you can mount your high horse here.

Aluminum / aluminium and pronouncing herbal as "errbal". Also "cracking" windows.

I've noticed that American and British pronunciation of French loan words tend to be inverted, wherever one is using approximate french pronounciation, the other has anglicized

In the kitchen, the American standard favors the French: herb (herb vs urb) and filet (fill-it vs fill-eh)

In a car, it is reversed: chassis (shassy vs chassy) and coupe (coop-eh vs coop)

Others that differ include (all where Brits favour a francophone pronounciation) papier maché, en route, double entendre

What drives me nuts is RP speakers that aspirate leading H's but insist on using the wrong article before them anyway. And the Americans that foolishly imitate them.

The whole "an hotel" nonsense?

I do however admire the American spelling of aluminium it does a great job of making alluminum sound more exotic.

Why worry about spelling when you can argue about whether two-spaces after a period is better than one?

That discussion becomes especially worthwhile when the text you're arguing about gets wrapped in HTML :-)

Despite Mark Twain's joke about the notion of simplifying English spelling [1], I believe a gradually engineered shift in spelling could reduce the friction when learning English as a second language.

Our spelling rules are obtuse and absurdly disconnected from the underlying phonemes. A better system for spelling would have a clear 1:1 mapping between the graphemes and the phonemes with a simple and concise rule set.

[1] https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...

That wasn't Mark Twain. Since that's "an official website of the United States government", maybe we should email them. (Edit: I emailed. I wonder if they'll reply. Edit 2: that page was eventually taken down.)

The joke originated as "Meihem in Ce Klasrum" [1] in a 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction [2] by the satirically named Dolton Edwards, and was reworked into a British variation in a 1971 letter to The Economist [3]. We had a thread about this not too long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23587507

[1] http://www.angelfire.com/va3/timshenk/codes/meihem.html

[2] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?57114

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200807181810/https://lettersof...

Insightful and entertaining post, dang! This fixes a misconception I've held for awhile, and albeit a rather minor one, it's important to correct.

Good on being proactive with the email, too :)

Yup. English spelling is an absolute mess. If you have an interest in linguistics, it's fun and interesting to be able to tell the origin of a word by its endings (-ize likely being of Greek origin etc). And sometimes it helps you when you're trying to spell a word of which you know the origin. But in the vast majority of cases, no one cares about any of that.

Everyone who can read even a tiny bit of English can make sense of -ise and -ize endings, so it's not really an issue in that regard -- it doesn't change the meaning of words, and the difference is inaudible. Things like "through trough though dough doe doff tough" are far harder (tougher, one might even say) for non-natives, and fixing those kinds of messes is a lot less obvious.

My favorite word and food is ghoti.

Then you'll be wanting to look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841, if you didn't see it a couple months ago.

I would argue that already exists in the form of AAVE but that it’s difficult to get people to think about it in those terms.

Which phonemes? I hope you mean to standardize spelling around deep West-Texas hybridized Chicano English, and not some atypical and well-nigh unintelligible coastal patois. Proper English contracts, drawls, and sprangs!

Something carefully constructed to be beneficial to ESL learners.

As people stop having kids, our economy will begin to depend on immigration. We need to make America the easy choice.

> As people stop having kids, our economy will begin to depend on immigration. We need to make America the easy choice.

How exactly do we benefit from other people occupying our old territory after we've died out?

If there's nobody to support you in old age, you're fucked.

That's a multi-faceted problem too. You need young workers paying into social security, you need an economy and marketplace that makes fixed income tractable, you need doctors and all other sorts of workers.

We want to avoid becoming Japan.

that will happen regardless, since you will die and your grandchildren are “other people”

This makes perfect sense as long as people see no difference between sending birthday presents to their own grandchildren and sending birthday presents to other people's grandchildren.

But that describes all of zero people.

"Seise" and "televise" don't look right to this UKian either. To a large extent, I think this is just a reflection of our education system being very right/wrong focussed, and these rules get put in place just to ensure there is a right and a wrong. We don't get on well with maybes.

I used to think the shot of "HMS Surprize" in the Star Trek:Enterprise(ize?) intro was some weird Americanism, but the spelling was indeed that in the 18th century, and flipped to HMS Surprise in 1796.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Surprise

American here. Does "seize" actually count? AFAIK "se" is not a word that got ize'd (as in "incentivize"). I can actually stand "televise" because the base word "television" uses an "s" after the "i". It looks weird on some randomly ize'd word, for example, if I want to make up a word for "making something more like an adventure" I'd say like "adventurize", because "adventurise" looks super weird.

I mentioned it just because it's in the article; I would never write seise but it does appear to be in the dictionary.

I think British people have more issue with turning words into verbs rather than the precise spelling - eg we'd never say "to alphabetize" or "to adventurize".

> It must be admitted that there are words with a ‘z’ in them that are purely American, like advertize

This is the first time I've ever seen anyone spell it like that, does anyone truly use this form of spelling advertise?

Slightly off topic, but since there are linguists here I thought I'd ask. Does the word winningest seem wrong to other people? It's such a foreign word to me that feels absolutely wrong. I only really hear it when watching US sports.

I'm from Australia, where we follow en-GB relatively closely for perspective.

It feels ugly to me, but there doesn't seem to be a concise alternative.

It's usually used to refer to a person's record of wins, as in the coach who has lead a team to more wins than any other coach, at which point they are the winningest.

He's the...

winningest coach

most successful coach when measured by how many wins

coach with the best win-loss ratio

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Most winning” would be the correct alternative, with the same number of syllables although to me it does feel more concise. As an American, I also hate this made up word.

While it looks weird written down, "winningest" feels lovely in the mouth

"ultimate"?

Then the runner-up is the penultimate.

I noticed this lately, I think when getting a new OS installed and making the dictionary UK English instead of Canadian English, thinking there would be little difference. The main issues have been with words that may end in an 'ism', e.g. criticize, nationalize, like those mentioned in the post. I've always spelt (purposely ignoring Canadian version, 'spelled' which I grew up with) these words with the 'ize' ending but the OS' UK English dictionary is now always flagging these as wrong, preferring the 'ise'.

See, to me 'spelt' just feels wrong, but 'ise' does too. I've found that I generally lean toward US English, but then they're the weird interactions with my own language (Dutch) that make me uncomfortable with words like 'aluminum'.

I am not a linguist, but I do speak BrE natively and to me "-t" and "-ed" are used in different context. The "-t" ending is used for adjectives ("dinner is burnt", "that child is spoilt", "it's spelt like this"), and "-ed" is used for conjugations of the verb ("I burned dinner", "you have spoiled your child", "I spelled it like this").

I honestly don't care either way, it's a bit jarring to me to see American spellings of things, and I've done work for gov.uk before where the style guide says to use British spellings, but I think it's just being obtuse if you have some evangelical adherence to either way.

Also a British English native speaker, and I'd generally use -t for both cases, though sometimes I'll use -ed. I seem to slightly bias away from "spelt" though, possibly due to it having another meaning. I suspect it's regional, and -ed feels slightly more passive to me (similar to 'it burned' vs 'I burnt it').

I have heard it described that -ed is used more often when the speaker is conceptualising the time it took, but -t is used as a default.

That would mean “it burned” brings to mind images more like “it was burning” and “I burnt it” brings to mind images of having something that is burnt.

Neither of your examples are passive btw.

-ize is better for scrabble players

I got on this topic tonight while playing with TeX's word hyphenation patterns, because the text-hyphen RubyGem responds to both :visualise and :visualize and I was trying to decide what the canonical one should be in my codebase :p

  irb(main):079:0> hyphen.visualise('visualize')
  => "visu-al-ize"

It's really a Greek vs. French difference, rather than an American vs. British one. I prefer -ize, but either spelling is acceptable to me.

Being a spelling pedant isn't a good idea, because unless you're an etymologist, you'll often get it wrong. (Sometimes mistakes even become Standard English, e.g. "ptarmigan", "sovereign", and "burgle" in UK.) Then there's the issue of Latin and Greek plurals. If you don't know those languages well enough, with a few exceptions (e.g. "crises", "phenomena") it's safer to just add -s or -es to the end of the word in English.

This has happened many times: British spelling or pronunciation deviates in modern times -- often due to classist tensions special to England -- but then ultimately the British incorrectly suppose the American way is the "ahistorical" one.

Another famous one is "solder". Until about 1920, the British universally pronounced it like the Americans did (derived from the French "souder"). Then the British slowly revised their pronunciation.

Heh, this is similar to how the British English accent developed after the American Revolutionary War, and thus the American accent is closer to Shakespeare's than that of modern Brits': https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180207-how-americans-p...

I'm also amused by all the former commonwealth people who call Americans backwards for refusing the metric system, yet still quote things in pints, miles, or, heaven forbid, stones.

There only one I regularly hear as a former British penal colonist is pints and if it's stinking hot while sitting outside most would prefer a schooner or middy.

Refusing to accept the metric system goes far beyond regional dialects and you all know it but are so fucking stubborn to ever change :)

> all the former commonwealth people who call Americans backwards […] yet still quote things in pints, miles, or, heaven forbid, stones.

Only Brits seem to do that. The rest of the Commonwealth and former Commonwealth nations have fully transitioned.

Canada seems to use a lot of traditional measures. Australians from the country seem to measure in feet and inches - not just peoples heights. And a foreigner might think an Australian asking for a pint of beer is asking for a measure of beer, although a pint is just the name of a size of glass (like a schooner or pot).

I'm skeptical of anything with connexions to the wrong university. ["the universities ... both of them" -- Sir Humphrey Appleby]

Should this have a (2013) suffix? Interesting article.

I thought the title would be too overwhelming with the already-parenthesized "(UK practice)" v(._. )v

> Updated 20 May 2012

edit: So this comment makes sense now that a mod edited the title, I originally submitted it as "The ‘-ize’ have it — About the use of -ise or -ize as an ending (UK practice)" :)

Can't you edit the title? Or maybe dang can

Zeds are cool! Ask the Cornish.

Cultural point about the joke in the title: It’s a pun on “The AYEs have it”, the sentence said by the speaker of the UK Parliament when the MPs vote AYE in majority (Aye = yes in old English). If the opposite, the NOes have it.

Often mistaken for “the eyes have it” and “the noses have it” for first-time viewers.

>Aye = yes in old English

I know the south likes to pretend we don't exist, but us northerners still say it every day.

I use it daily. Picked it up when living in the UK's midlands. No londoner has ever commented on it nor gotten confused.

It's more the western freedomers the imperialists.

That indeed was puzzling to me, but I figured it out by the very entertaining live coverage of parliament sessions last year (with John Bercow still as Mr Speaker). I only knew Aye from pirate movies (and Highlander), so I thought it was a reference to Royal Navy history or some such lol. In US congress (?) they display Yea/Nee on voting displays I believe; anyone knows where that originates from?

Edit: there's also the "the Ayes to right, the Noes to the left" thing which contributes to the confusion; it's sad that the House of Commons can't congregate in close proximity like they used to due to coronavirus I guess

> the Ayes to right, the Noes to the left

The Cambridge Union Society, being based on the House of Commons, has a slight extension to this - Ayes to the right, Noes to the left, abstentions down the middle. You're counted as you leave the chamber, so anyone abstaining leaves through the unmarked central door.

https://miro.medium.com/max/908/1*ut4G1Vo8C8Uc4sqQ4A6m-Q.png

> London Transport invariably used the ‘- ize’ form in posters and other public communications

There's no such thing as London Transport, it's Transport for London, and they invariably do not use -ize, they use -ise, as per by their editorial style guide.

I think if TfL started using -ize on their posters there would be a riot in the UK.

TfL was created in the year 2000. Before that it was called London Transport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_public_transport_au...

    2.1 1933-1948: London Passenger Transport Board
    2.2 1948-1963: London Transport Executive
    2.3 1963-1970: London Transport Board
    2.4 1970-1984: London Transport Executive
    2.5 1984-2000: London Regional Transport
    2.6 2000 onwards: Transport for London

EDIT: genuinely confusing why this got downvotes.

The article says this:

> Many of the great publishing houses are happy with ‘ -ize’ etc endings, and large, influential organizations such as London Transport invariably used the ‘- ize’ form in posters and other public communications, though their modern PC-originated material leaves much to be desired.

The article is comparing historic material with modern TfL materials. Historically, it wasn't called Transport for London, it was colloquially known as London Transport because 1) that was their branding and ii) the names were variations of London Transport X.

Branding for London Transport: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Transport_(brand)

Here's a poster for London Transport: https://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/jan-8-20...

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