Spelling Dilemma

The Issue

I'm having trouble settling on a formal spelling style for my account, but I want to be consistent on it! I'm a Canada-Obsessed American and I have 3 different styles I currently blend haphazardly. Below is a list of spellings, their quirks, and information.

American

American Spelling has a distinct lack of the letter u in words ending in "or", which more closely reflects the Latin origins of these words. For example, "color." And it makes heavier use of "ize" as compared to "ise." There are lots of minute things like this, including spelling defense with an s instead of an e.

Canadian

Canadian Spelling uses aspects of both American and British spelling, as put by the book Editing Canadian English:

<blockquote>Canadian English reflecting our country's historical ties to Britain and its geographical proximity to the United States, has been influenced by both British and American cultures. It is no surprise, then, that Canadians use a hybrid of ENglish that derives from two spelling traditions.</blockquote>

Canadian spelling retains the spelling -our in words like colour, and -re in words like centre. It also has some more minute things. Not every dictionary agrees on how to spell things, but things like above are pretty unanimous. I love the way it looks, too! This is of course a massive oversimplification of both American and Canadian spellings, but it's for the sake of brevity.

Unique Style

I have actually developed my own unique way of spelling, applied only partially to my online communications. This was borne of the feeling that American spelling doesn't go far enough and is wildly inconsistent with its choices. With this I sought out to make American spelling more consistent as well as proposing other minor spelling changes to the language, while keeping it's character intact.

Some of these changes are sweeping, systematic changes that can be applied widely, while others are more minute and go on a case-by-case basis.

Notable words are:

Spelling aesthetic like esthetic
Spelling phoenix like phenix or pheanix
Spelling neuron like nuron

There are a lot more radical changes that I don't think people would actually adopt in their own speech, so I tend not to use the more radical ones. But I think the top two especially are tasteful and consistent.

"esthetic" is normally spelled like "aesthetic" in all spellings, but Canadian and American spellings of anesthetic contain the word aesthetic within them! In British English it's consistently spelled as "anaesthetic." But even British English is inconsistently spelled! For example, penalty is spelled the same way across all spellings, but subpoena is spelled with an œ despite having the same root! Would it not just be nicer to have penalty and subpena?

Therefore, one systematic change is undertaken. Words of Greek origin, containing the diphthong "ai" and "oi" in Greek, which become "ae" and "oe" in Latin, (as well as some native Latin words with these diphthongs) are uniformly simplified to "e". This way, we have a simpler and more uniform spelling.

A simpler way to describe it is "ae" and "oe" when pronounced like "ee" or "eh" are written with e. But words like "poem" or "aero" which were originally spelt in Greek with ae and oe, not ai and oi retain their spellings due to their pronunciations being congruent with their spellings.

End

So yeah. This was really just an excuse to talk about my special interest, but I seriously do want to stop going back in forth between American, Canadian, and SUPER AMERICAN spellings. I may need to experiment a little before I figure it out, but I enjoyed thinking it out on paper here.

0 Kudos

Comments

Displaying 0 of 0 comments ( View all | Add Comment )