Still making my way through the backlog of queries I've received, and still in
March. It must be said that while I'm trying to get through the backlog in chronological order, some luckier souls have their queries answered more immediately. It just depends on what else is going on at the time.
Anyhoo (that's an AmE and extremely colloquial, allegedly humorous version of
anyhow), the_sybil wrote back then to say:
Had you ever considered writing about the way in which the spelling of words with vowel groups originating from Latin dipthongs (oesophagus/esophagus, oestrogen/estrogen) have been simplified in AmE usage? Don't know whether there's anything of interest to say about them or not.
I got thinking about it because the other day I came across the spelling "Edipal" in an online text about psychology - and being a BrE speaker rather than an AmE speaker, I had to do some googling to be certain it was an error rather than an acceptable alternative spelling.
Let's start with some history. As
Oedipal hints, most of these can be traced back to Greek, then to Latin, then to English. Greek
oi became Latin
Å“ (with a ligature between the letters) became, more commonly,
oe in contemporary (post-typewriter) English. In Latin and English,
oe and
ae are pronounced as a single sound (which sound is another matter, and can vary from case to case), rather than as two vowel syllables or as
diphthongs, i.e. a combined vowel sound. (Still, because they're written as two vowels, many people refer to them as
diphthongs--but they should be calling them
digraphs instead.) The simplification of
ae and
oe to
e is present in Noah Webster's dictionaries (late 18th/early 19th c.), but I'm not sure whether the shift (like many others) originated with him or not, as it's not mentioned in any of
his spelling reform documents that I've found.
It's tempting to believe the kind of advice given below from
Ask Oxford's Better Writing guide (as well as other sources on BrE/AmE differences), that:
British English words that are spelled with the double vowels ae or oe (e.g. archaeology, manoeuvre) are just spelled with an e in American English (archeology, maneuver).
But as the_sybil has discovered, there are cases in which
ae and
oe are not reduced to
e in AmE, including:
- many names and derivatives of them, whether from Greek/Latin or not (Disraeli, Michael, Caedmon, Aelfric, Caesar/Caesarean, Oedipus/Oedipal)
- a few ae words that are not from Greek/Latin (at least not directly) and in which ae is usually pronounced as a diphthong (maelstrom, maestro)
- some recent-ish borrowings from French and other languages with oe: oeuvre, hors d'oeuvres, trompe l'oeil
- the Latin feminine, plural suffix -ae, as in (predominantly AmE) alumnae, lacunae, ulnae, etc.
- words with aer(o)- as a prefix or root: aerial, aerosol, aerodrome (but, of course, aeroplane is almost always airplane in AmE).
- some Scottish English words, and words from Gaelic: Gaelic, nae, brae, etc.
- (Probably not worth mentioning, but words that end in oe like toe and shoe are never reduced to e in AmE, since the vowel sound here is /o/ or /u/or similar. And, of course, the oe that straddles a morpheme boundary in 3rd person verbs and plurals like goes and potatoes are not reduced to e.)
Edward M Carney in
A survey of English spelling estimates that the BrE
ae is
e in AmE in 89% of words and 63% of names. (I was a bit puzzled that the name claim was so high, as I have a hard time thinking of names that are spelt differently in the two dialects. The only one I can come up with is
Rachel, which I'd never seen spelt
Rachael until I moved to the UK--but now I notice
that an American cooking celebrity has that name.)
Still, there are some Greek/Latin
ae/oe words that I learned to spell with the
ae/oe back in America, and which are often spelt like that, regardless of the 'rule'. For example,
aesthetics is taught in most American university philosophy departments, not
esthetics. In fact,
aesthetic gets 28.9 million Google hits, while
esthetic gets only 3.5 million. (Compare a more reliable AmE/BrE distinction
favor/favour in which the AmE form gets 243 million hits and the BrE form only 39.3 million.) Still, in lists of spelling differences,
esthetic is frequently cited as the AmE equivalent of BrE
aesthetic, with no further qualification. In spite of this AmE strongly prefers
anesthetic over (BrE)
anaesthetic.This can result in some difficulties in finding information in the Information Age. Last week, I tried to look up
haemolysis in the index of the British-i{s/z}ed edition of an originally American book. It wasn't there, and I just couldn't believe it. Only later did I accidentally stumble upon it, and all of the other
haemo- words, between
HELLP and
hepatitis. Once they changed the spelling from
hemolysis, they forgot to re-alphabeti{s/z}e that bit of the index, apparently. (They did manage for
foetal, though, which comes between
fluid and
folic acid.) Another problem occurs when I suggest that my students use encyclop(a)edias of linguistics as sources of background material and ideas for their research projects. They come back to me and say that our library is (BrE)
crap and no such books are there. I point out that there are, if you remember to use both spellings of
encyclop(a)edia as your key words in the electronic catalog(ue) search.
The divide between BrE and AmE spelling may be narrowing, according to some sources:
Even in British English there is a slow trend toward simplification: For example, the form encyclopedia is now much more common than encyclopaedia. (from English Toolbox)
foetus vs fetus: In American English, foetus is usually not used. In British English usage is divided. In academic literature, fetus is preferred. (Wikipedia Manual of Style)
The OED notes that (usually AmE)
eon is preferred over (usually BrE)
aeon in Geology. So, there seems to be a tendency toward regulari{s/z}ation in international academic fields.
Most AmE/BrE spelling differences reflect no particular differences in pronunciation, and most of the
ae/oe cases are the same, but some have come to be pronounced differently.
(O)estrogen is one such case. In AmE, the first syllable in
estrogen rhymes with
west. In BrE, the first syllable of
oestrogen typically sounds like
east. However, many BrE speakers pronounce
(o)esophagus with a short vowel, like the Americans do. [This last claim edited since original post.] Another case is
p(a)edophile. In BrE, the first syllable is usually pronounced like
peed, and in AmE it more usually (though not exclusively)
ped. But both dialects pronounce
p(a)ediatrician with a 'peed', regardless of the different spelling.
P.S. Since writing this post, I've written a more in-depth one about the problematic f(o)etus.
Other business
- I don't know if cross-Atlantic spelling differences will come up, but I'm going up to London this week to appear on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. It seems they'll be doing a spelling challenge and want to be trained by some serious Scrabble players. Should be a (BrE colloq/jovial) larf.
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