From: utzoo!decvax!duke!bcw
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Re: Noah Webster's language reforms
Article-I.D.: duke.2302
Posted: Sat Jul 10 17:58:18 1982
Received: Sun Jul 11 03:49:20 1982


From:	Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University
Re:	Noah Webster's language reforms

I too heard that Noah Webster reformed the American spellings of various
English words such as

	colour	=> color
	centre	=> center

and so forth.  Unfortunately this is not quite the way things happened.
Recently I was curious about some of this and looked up some of the
history of such words in the Oxford English Dictionary (the big un-
abridged version);  if any authority has an ax to grind about "improper
American spelling" it would be this one.  According to the Oxford
dictionary, these spellings were taken as valid alternate spellings in
England until Johnson published his dictionary in the late 18th century;
in fact the use of "er" rather than "re" in words like centre vs center
or theatre vs theater was preferred in Shakespeare's time even in England!

It appears that what happened was that the language was simply evolving
differently in the two countries, probably helped along by a certain
desire to be different from "those monarchists" and "those anarchists."

			Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University