On Tuesday 29 August 2006 11:07, Tim wrote: >Tim: >> > Some time ago our newspapers started using American spelling, which >> > *is* "incorrect" to do in Australia. One reason given was that it >> > was a complete pain trying to work around the American spell checker. > >Gene Heskett: >> Humm, if it results in less miss-understandings between the peoples by >> pushing the people toward a common ground for language usage, I can't >> see as its an undesirable effect. > >Okay, let's see the yanks fall in line with origins of their language, >rather than subverting someone else's... ;-) > In our defense, I believe that some of the more technical terms we've bastardized from the kings english (did you ever try to read that?) have been improvements over the original, whose exact meanings seem to have become somewhat foggy with age. Besides that, we also suffer from the majority rules mentality and there's 220 million of us these days. :) >> In the above case, I believe there are English(GB) versions of the >> spell checkers available, so why don't they use them? > >My guess would be along the lines that a dedicated news paper's printing >system was a bit more limited in software choices than the average desk >top computer word processor. I did say "some time ago", I've no idea >what their current excuse is. I should have pointed that out. When you're running macs because that what all publishers use for composition chores, the choices are going to be somewhat more limited than for x86 platforms. >For what it's worth, Australian English is distinctly different than >other countries. You do need to regionalise such things. Trying to >tell another country to spell things in a foreign way is insulting. >We'll inventitate our own languages, thank you very much... Ok, start by defineing 'inventitate' so the rest of the world knows what you are saying. Sounds rather like something we came up with in the 60's as a phrase applied to a redesign effort to remove superfulous parts. We called in 'simplicating' at the time. And probably still do in some circles... >-- >(Currently running FC4, in case that's important to the thread) Couldn't prove it one way or the other to me, I'm still on FC2 here at the Heskett Ranchette. >Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. >I read messages from the public lists. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
