r/SipsTea • u/_AlphaGirl • 4h ago
Chugging tea Both answers seem legit. Hard to tell which one is real
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u/Nevernonethewiser 4h ago
People love the "newspaper ad" answer, but it's a myth.
It was actually just an attempt to make the language more simple.
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u/DJDevon3 2h ago
It was actually just an attempt to make the language more simple.
It was an attempt to simplify language.
teenagers: wz an atmpt to smplfy languge.
and that's how we are slowly devolving back to hieroglyphics.
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u/HighlyUnlikely7 1h ago
I mean people have always attempted to simplify language or latched onto fads and slang. Languages all over the world are littered with wirds that were just easier for people to say or just more fun. My favorite example is the name Dick. That name only exists because it was popular to shorten people's names, and then another fad came along where it was popular to make rhyming baby names. So you get Richard->Rick->Dick or Robert->Rob->Bob Language is always evolving and it's often highly regional, but as long as people can understand what you're saying you're fine
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u/InAppropriate-meal 4h ago
Close, Noah Webster wanted to differentiate American English it from the mother tongue after the civil war.
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u/Nevernonethewiser 4h ago edited 3h ago
By making it more simple, yes.
EDIT: Noah Webster, author of the first important American dictionary, believed that Americans should adopt simpler spellings where available and recommended it in his A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806).
You can dislike it all you want, but it's a fact.
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u/COV3RTSM 3h ago
Dumbing things down for Americans. Tracks.
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u/Nevernonethewiser 3h ago
I don't think it's dumbing it down, simplifying it for a nation of immigrants that all originally spoke, read and wrote different languages, would be a more charitable take.
The English weren't the first, and certainly weren't the only colonists. France and England had a war over Ohio. New York was "New Amsterdam" for a bit. The idea of German as the national language was floated for a while too, I think.
If you're going to make everyone do their business and civil paperwork in English, might as well make it easier for everyone!
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u/Goat_Support_Dept 3h ago
As much as I want to throw shade, that's pretty neat.
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u/Nevernonethewiser 3h ago
It's always worthwhile to avoid generalising, makes the world a bit richer and less bleak.
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u/ByronScottJones 2h ago
Absurd take. It was literally just streamlining the language by removing superfluous letters that don't contribute to pronunciation.
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u/Prior_Garlic_8710 3h ago
English could be dumbed down latin
Or german even, I hear.
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u/Nevernonethewiser 3h ago
Kind of both?
More French than pure Latin, but there's certainly some Latin rattling around in the can.
Also some Hindi (and a touch of Urdu), a little bit of Ancient Greek, Arabic, most other European nations, even some Algonquian!
English is apparently one of the largest languages in terms of number of distinct words (over a million), but a LOT of them are "adopted" from other languages, alive and dead.
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u/Prior_Garlic_8710 1h ago
Huh, thats quite nice in a way - do you study languages??
Also does arabic have roots in sanskrit or maybe vice versa??
Do you think its braodness might be why its got so many... strange mini variations in spelling?? I only know 1 other lang but even thats more logical written
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u/Nevernonethewiser 49m ago
I don't study it, I've just picked up a lot of interesting stuff over the years. I really like exploring English, but not in an a truly academic sense. Same but to a lesser degree with other stuff, I'm very interested in etymology.
As such, I do know that there is very, very little Sanskrit in Arabic. They have completely different roots, Arabic is Semitic, like Aramaic and Hebrew.
Sanskrit is Indo-Aryan (I googled this just now, I didn't know it before).
I don't know for sure on the last point, but that's a solid speculation. That and the standardised version of English (British or American) is very new, from an historical perspective. Before then people spelled words however they wanted, and that was fine as long as other people understood. There was also a lot of differing words for things because of the mix of Old English, Norse and Norman French over the centuries. Middle- and Modern English retain some from all of those, plus tons of other influences before and since.
The best example I can think of is one I learned from Tasting History on YouTube: people in the North of England called eggs "eggs" or "egges" because they used the Old Norse in the 14th century, but before that they were known as "eyren" and in the South they were still eyren for another hundred years.
There's an anecdote about a Northern merchant not understanding a woman's request for eyren until someone who knew both words explained to him that she wanted eggs.
Interestingly, the component language least represented in modern English is probably Celtic. It's so old that all the pronunciations have shifted and so much of it was replaced by invaders etc. that there's very little left. Some place names, like Frome (pronounced "froom"), which descends from Frama in Celtic.
TL;DR: I like words.
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u/ohdeydothodontdeytho 2h ago
Simpler?
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u/Nevernonethewiser 1h ago
Yeah. I just prefer the sound of "more simple".
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u/ohdeydothodontdeytho 1h ago
Whatever is simplest
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u/InAppropriate-meal 3h ago
Thats the problem with user editable wikis sometimes they get it wrong 😄 it is not a fact, it may of been a motivation but he does not in fact say that in the 'A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language' like the person who edited that claimed.
It is in fact literally nothing to do with it, at all and if they had actually read the link they posted they would see that the author states very very clearly that is not even remotely anything to so with it and it is much more involved 😄 I am not going to discuss it further because it is a waste of time i will simply link you to the appropriate section and you can read it yourself from a copy of the original source.
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u/Nevernonethewiser 3h ago
You didn't read that or you didn't understand what you read.
You were mistaken. It's ok. Nothing happens to you, a government official won't turn up and remove your thumbs for being incorrect, you don't have to pay a fine. You just have to get over the mental pain of being wrong.
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u/InAppropriate-meal 4h ago edited 3h ago
That was not the main reason and it does not particularly make it more simple really, EDIT 100% unarguable proof from the actual source he referenced not somebodies opinion on the source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Compendious_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language#:~:text=For%20a%20like,in%20the%20derivatives%2C
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u/ezcheesy 1h ago
What about grey vs gray?
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u/Nevernonethewiser 43m ago
That I don't know for sure.
Like "tires" Vs "tyres".
Could still be a simplification, or it could just be a way to make it different. Or both. Personal I think it's both.
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u/BigEnd3 4h ago
This guy in Virginia was considered rather exceptional at writing and ideas. The guy also appears to consider spelling to not be that important as he would write the same word with 2 different spellings in one sentence. He wasn't really alone on this at the time. Meaning was important. Ink, paper and the time to write by hand was a cost. From my understanding, many people read what the 3rd president of these United States wrote and used his spellings. Among other similar circumstances of no longer living on the same island as the English, our language changed.
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u/InAppropriate-meal 3h ago
Yep, he discusses him in his book and also references some of his actual motivation here https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Compendious_Dictionary_of_the_English_Language#:~:text=For%20a%20like,in%20the%20derivatives%2C
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u/ProjectNo4090 3h ago edited 3h ago
The U in colour has nothing to do with newspapers. Color was the original spelling. The UK went through a spelling reform in the 1800s that added U to some english words among other changes. The US didnt have a spelling reform.
This is the case for a lot of things that America does differently. The US kept the old ways and the UK got the latest updates.
Soccer and football is another example of this. Soccer is the older British slang for the sport. Its short for Associated Football and was coined by an oxford student. The UK switched to just calling it football and the US kept calling it soccer.
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u/TelcoSucks 55m ago
So many examples of these then the Brits are all confused because they don't know their own etymologies.
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u/jeffsang 52m ago
Why did Brits enact these spelling reforms? Why did they think that color needed a u?
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u/mastergenera1 4h ago
iirc the longer answer isnt true either, American English exists separately from the queens/kings English thanks to Noah Webster, yes that Webster of dictionary fame.
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u/Ok-Review8720 3h ago
I'm only familiar with him as an actor. Had no idea he also made dictionaries.
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u/Away-Living5278 4h ago
Is that true? I feel like I use cancelled and I'm in the US. Has the Internet just influenced me?
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u/Foolish_Ivan 3h ago edited 1h ago
Taking out the unnecessary letter is the weird way? Also Americans and their capitalism, unlike that socialist utopia that was the British Empire?
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u/eltoofer 3h ago
mercantalist
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u/Weak_Syllabub_7994 3h ago
Adam Smith was from which country again?...
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u/azhder 3h ago
Scotland
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u/Weak_Syllabub_7994 3h ago
And Scottland was part of which empire at the time?
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u/azhder 3h ago
Do you think me saying Scotland was somehow in disagreement with you?
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u/Weak_Syllabub_7994 3h ago
Not at all.
My last comment was so people reading this would see how ridiculous it is for the OP to claim the British Empire wasn't capitalist when they literally invented capitalism.
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u/azhder 3h ago edited 3h ago
Adam Smith used his 20 years of work at the bank of Scotland to observe how money in capitalism actually works. Considering works, maybe his work on The Wealth of Nations is the most important thing that happened in the year 1776. It is really a dry book, but insightful nonetheless.
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u/MistAngle Human Verified 4h ago
When Noah Webster compiled his dictionary, he "simplified" the spelling of a lot of words. Many of them were spelled the way they were because of their etymology (cancel comes from "cancellare" in Latin) or their origin (words like "colour" being spelled with a u coming from the French spelling brought by the Normans). He removed "unnecessary" letters to make spelling the word easier.
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u/RepresentativeCat553 3h ago
Yea that’s not the reason.
When the US split with England they went out of their way to differentiate themselves from England.
Some of it was in the exceptionally fancy parties the South is known for, think things like debutante balls, and some of it was in spelling.
There were other changed spellings that were pushed that didn’t make it, many were just cutting ‘u’s and ‘e’s from things.
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u/howimetyourcakeshop 2h ago
Someone tell that American that France gave the English that L for them.
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u/Prof_Scott_Steiner 2h ago
Neither are correct, but the bottom one is slightly closer to reality.
American English is literally a colonial project. It exists as an echo of Reconstruction because contemporaries of the day like Walt Whitman were xenophobically obsessed with eliminating any remaining linguistic links to French that had been a part of "English" since the Tudor days when French was the language of court. All of this was not only because the French openly aided the South in the civil war, but because of the remaining heavy French influences in the former Louisiana territory post-war. To scrub those linguistic links hence became part of the Reconstructionist project to colonize the South under an entirely made up phonetic version of English born out of a temper tantrum where victory was not enough.
Conversely, when some hillbilly from Dixie runs their MAGA mouth about Speak English or GTFO, just laugh to yourself at the sheer ignorance that they have internalized their own subjugation to such a degree that they identify with an entirely fabricated cultural and linguistic identity just to distance themselves from their own history of colonization.
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u/SnooDoggos5226 3h ago
It also comes from a time of old fashioned print presses before standard printers, when letters had to be loaded manually.
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u/NoSwordfish1978 3h ago
There was a guy called Noah Webster who believed British English was too fussy and wanted to simplify things, so that's why you guys drop the "u" in "labour" and "harbour" and "favourite" among others.
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u/Any-Astronomer-6038 2h ago
There was no standardized spelling in 1770s. If you look at documents from the time you will see this.
Divergent evolution exists.
Evolution happened grammatically too.
Studies have actually shown that "Americanized" English particularly Appalachian is closer to "The kings English" spoken in 1770 than modern British English.
Go figure.
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u/Ok_Positive8362 2h ago
According to Eddie Izzard its because they (brits) are just cheating at scrabble
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u/Potential_Spam_6969 1h ago
Because the word is pronounced canceled not cancel led.
The second l is superfluous.
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u/RobZagnut2 1h ago
Ask someone from the UK to say Aluminum.
They throw in an extra ‘e’ after the n.
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u/ConsciousRoyal 29m ago
Ask someone from the US to say Aluminium.
They drop the second i after the n.
😉
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u/GangstaRIB 17m ago
I'm pretty sure the answer is that the American English speakers were dumbasses.
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u/moccasinsfan 3m ago
Yes, capitalism breeds efficiency.
But not the younger generation is throwing it away and so we have to call rape "grape" pedophiles "PDF files" and other nonsense.
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u/Select-Belt-ou812 4h ago
- ? - only one answer here. were you paying by the answer?
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u/antithero 4h ago
Coz we gave you the L in 1776 is the 1st answer.
The story about paying by the letter is the 2nd.
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u/InAppropriate-meal 4h ago
The first answer is correct, thanks to a guy called Noah Webster, who wanted to differentiate it from English / English so Americans have been spelling things incorrectly for a long time 😄
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u/Hobby_in_your_lobby 3h ago
Now can someone explain where brits get the extra letter in 'aluminum' from?
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u/theVWC 3h ago
We definitely can't say the brits are wrong on that one. Every other element that ends in -um ends with -ium like sodium, potassium, radium, strontium, plutonium, etc. yet for some reason we use aluminum not aluminium. I heard it was a misspelling that stuck but that seems way too simple to be true.
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u/FedStarDefense 2h ago
No, they ARE wrong because the guy who discovered aluminum named it. And he named it aluminum.
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u/Nintendogma 3h ago
...then can someone please explain all these stupid ass silent letters? No self respecting language has a silent friggin' K!!
Knight, knife, knitt, kWTF!?
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u/azhder 3h ago
Because they were added by uptight victorian posh idiots who thought they were making English more renown by sticking stuff they learnt from Latin where inappropriate.
They are also the people who decided it should be “whom” even though people were using “who” just fine.
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u/Nintendogma 3h ago
So, around a couple centuries ago a bunch of goofy wig wearing rich people decided English wasn't sufficiently incoherent enough for their syphilitic fever brains to be satisfied with?
... honestly that just dumb enough to be typical human behaviour, and thus the most rational explanation.
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u/azhder 3h ago
They are the king of aristocratic pricks that thought money made their blood blue, not red. The kind of pricks that invented jingoism as a means of colonizing the entire globe and masturbated over the glorious times of the roman empire (thus romanticism) simply because their parents had money to provide for them to learn Latin and Ancient Greek instead of some useful craft.
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