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Lingua::EN::VarCon - Starting a war against America(n) More | Login | Reply

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Analogy a bit broken (Score:2)

by grantm (164) on 2006.03.25 17:05 (#46762) Homepage Journal

As I understand things, American wasn't originally a fork of English. The 'simpler' spellings (eg: harbor instead of harbour) you referred to were actually the common usage in England at the time.

What happened was the English language continued to develop and more elegant spelling conventions were imported from other languages (esp. French). But the Americans no longer had real-time network access to the development branch. They were stuck on the last stable release which quickly became outdated.

Ultimately of course, the Americans did need to fix some bugs and add some much needed features to keep the language useful to the installed base. The result was a fork, but the spelling wasn't simplified on the forked branch it was complicated on the trunk.

Reply to This
- Noah Webster's fork (Score:1)
  
  by mr_bean (3802)
  
  I believe Noah Webster forked it for no real
  reason. It was a nation-building exercise. A
  language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

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