@c0dec0dec0de @futurebird I thought it was Noah Webster who popularized most of the USA-specific spellings?

@llewelly @futurebird maybe, I might be misplacing attribution because the novelty of learning the Ben Franklin was involved in the Americanization of English and was radical as heck about it—although it does fit with his whole oeuvre, doesn’t it?

@futurebird
gray: the color of a soft gray cat.

grey: the colour of a cloudy sky, overcast for months on end.

@llewelly @futurebird

@c0dec0dec0de @futurebird wikipedia says Franklin created a phonetic alphabet of his own, with six letters removed, and six new letters he invented for sounds which didn't have them, and that seems like a more radical alteration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin%27s_phonetic_alphabet

in the past, I've read conflicting accounts of how much he advocated his new alphabet, and how serious he was about it.

@llewelly @futurebird I mean, there’s around 46 phonemes or sounds in the English language and experts don’t agree on the precise number, -ough makes 3(?) different sounds why? The English thought colonial English was lazy and bastardized by taking words from the indigenous people (canoe, for example)—English of all languages degraded by stealing words from another language?!
This bit of history, the British empire fighting to control the evolution of its language, puts into slightly different light for me the existence of l’Académie Française. It’s just nakedly an authoritarian enterprise to try to control how people speak. I thought the idea was neat when I saw it in Derek Künsken’s
Quantum Evolution series—he had a francophone space empire that versioned the French language over the ages… with was nakedly authoritarian, but I didn’t connect that to the language bit until later.

@c0dec0dec0de @llewelly

"English of all languages degraded by stealing words from another language?!"

If English gave back all the stolen words we'd all just need to sit there and be silent.

@futurebird @llewelly would that be undeserved?

@llewelly @futurebird I mean, there’s around 46 phonemes or sounds in the English language and experts don’t agree on the precise number, -ough makes 3(?) different sounds why? The English thought colonial English was lazy and bastardized by taking words from the indigenous people (canoe, for example)—English of all languages degraded by stealing words from another language?!
This bit of history, the British empire fighting to control the evolution of its language, puts into slightly different light for me the existence of l’Académie Française. It’s just nakedly an authoritarian enterprise to try to control how people speak. I thought the idea was neat when I saw it in Derek Künsken’s
Quantum Evolution series—he had a francophone space empire that versioned the French language over the ages… with was nakedly authoritarian, but I didn’t connect that to the language bit until later.

@c0dec0dec0de @llewelly @futurebird -ough obviously makes at least 4, in tough, cough, though and thought.

@DrHyde @c0dec0dec0de @futurebird and, at least historically, hiccough was pronounced /ˈhɪ.kʌp/ ... ugh.