Quote:
Originally Posted by NullNix
To be fair, Webster was also trying to simplify away some of the more ridiculous spelling anachronisms of English to make it easier to learn to spell. He couldn't eliminate the worst, originating from the Great Vowel Shift, because they're just too pervasive, but dropping the silent 'u' was probably a good idea (IMHO he should have dropped the 'b' from 'debt' and the ridiculous 'g' from 'foreign' as well, but didn't.)
A bunch of his neologisms aren't neologisms at all: spellings with -ize are the original English spelling, and vanished very late, in the 20th century. Some, admittedly conservative, British English style guides still recommend using -ize to this day.
Some of his ideas didn't win out, though -- the original Webster's has, in addition to a whole pile of non-u words spelled in a way which nobody at the original time of printing actually followed, words like 'tung'. You know, the thing in your head. That one never really caught on. (The name of tungsten is not related: it's from Swedish, a heavy stone, not a tongue stone.)
There seems to have been a fad for this sort of thing among very smart people on both sides of the Atlantic. On the other side of the pond a brilliant mathematician with a sideline in writing was gifting the language with a bunch of unusual words in (what was later republished as) _Jabberwocky_, several of which have become part of the language to such a degree that most people don't realise that their appearance in _Jabberwocky_ was as invented as 'brillig'. (Like 'chortled'.)
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One very good change was getting rid of the name zed for the letter Z (pronounced zee). Zed doesn't really fit when you say the alphabet.