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Comment by m0nty | Hacker News Reader

> 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 :)

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>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.

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