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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> “colour” is itself a mutation, the French word being «couleur»

That's what the French word is now. But the French word used to be color, which is where the American spelling comes from, a late, backward-looking reform. Are you sure it wasn't colour in French when the English spelling standardized?

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Accordingly to this article:

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/color-colour/

It seems the French spelling was "colour" at one point.

TIL, thanks

And myself in the process of answering you :)

The way I remember it, Webster standardised a lot of the spellings to be close to how it’s pronounced. The u in colour is never pronounced,…etc.

I wouldn't bet on that. The u in colour is never pronounced, but neither is the o.[1] The spelling color is much more likely to be motivated by that being the Latin spelling of the word.

[1] I watched Star Trek: The Original Series recently and the cast's pronunciation of "sensors" with the FORCE vowel in the second syllable is really jarring. Do we know if that was an affectation or a natural pronunciation?

I think you're hearing a typical Vulcan accent...

Spock says it a lot, which is very conspicuous, but the rest of the cast pronounce it the same way.

I was always amused when someone ordered the launch of some some form of buoy.

"launch a boo-eey"

(Brit's distinguish between "boy" and "buoy" - the latter has the same sound as in "buoyancy")

> (Brit's distinguish between "boy" and "buoy" - the latter has the same sound as in "buoyancy")

That didn't clarify much. I would pronounce "buoyancy" as if it began with "boy".

The 'o' in boy is 'oh', that in buoy is 'oy'; the distinction is subtle, but can be heard, plus the latter is slightly longer.

Edited: - Maybe this will help:

http://www.employees.org/~dfawcus/Good-Boy_Life-Buoy.m4a

So I should probably have written 'some Brits'...

Anyway, if someone can't hear the difference in that sample, load it in to an audio editor, and see that (in a time / amplitude graph) the two words have different shapes.

I've not got a tool for graphing the frequency content to hand, so can't easily see how those would be distinguished.

(Am British.)

I don't understand either. As far as I'm concerned, boy and buoy are homophones, and the first syllable of buoyancy is too.

Wiktionary agrees: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buoy#Pronunciation

It's like the way the 'G' is pronounced in 'GIF'. You know, like in 'garage'.

As an American, I pronounce buoy as a two- syllable word: boo-ee. I have only heard buoy pronounced as “boy” in the northeast, not at all universal across the country.

One story is that it's an (over)correction of Leonard Nimoy's native Boston accent, which would otherwise obliterate the /r/.

Southie Spock would have been amazing though.

Maybe they didn't want to awaken the censors...

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