US spelling reform, the letter 's'

Webster's motivation is difficult to understand. He changed centre to center, labour to labor, and authorise to authorize. At least I assume the last one was his. If he indeed changed that S to a Z, why didn't he do it with other words?

But it's just as well. Perhaps he foresaw the explosion in both literacy and printing, and knew that some day the Brits and Americans would be reading each other's writings routinely and in large volume. He may have elected to just make a few changes as a mark of American pride, so anyone reading it could tell which side of the ocean it was written on.

As you probably know, it's recently been discovered that we read words holistically, taking in all the letters at once, rather than scanning the letters sequentially. As long as the first and last letters are correct the arrangement of the ones in between is not terribly important. Taht enipxlas why enyeovre can raed a steecnne taht lokos lkie tihs ptetry qckuliy.

But if there is an incorrect letter, or a missing or extra letter, it throws us off even if all the others are in the right place. We have to change visual modes and scrutinize each letter to find the mistake and figure out what the word is. The same process most of us use when reading in a foreign alphabet.

So when an American encounters organise, colour or theatre it slows him down, and I'm sure our spelling has the same effect in the UK. Still, we've been exposed to those three specific changes for so long that our visual processing center may have come to accept them as "alternate" spellings like fulfil and judgement, so perhaps they don't really slow us down.

But if Webster had undertaken a holesale revizhun uv American spelling, it kood meen dhat tooday Amerikanz and Inglishmen mite not be abel too reed eech udher'z riting at ol, or at leest not fast enuf too enjoy it.

British and Americans don't pronounce words the same way, so it would be impossible to devise a spelling system that would be phonetic for both. This is what is stalling the movement to romanize Chinese writing. Cantonese and Mandarin are written the same way, but they are two different languages with very little similarity in pronunciation, not even a mapping from one to the other. Each has phonemes that the other lacks.

 

Most of them don't, since our whole problem revolves around the fact that we pronounce words differently even when we spell them the same. There are only a few words like spelled/spelt and aluminum/aluminium which are both spelled and pronounced differently. Color/colour, center/centre and organize/organise are pronounced the same on both sides. To the extent that any phoneme is the same in the two countries! We pronounce the R in all three of those words and you don't.

Whereas words like schedule and laboratory are different.

There are myriad phonemes that are pronounced differently in the two countries and it's not a systematic enough difference to render it into spelling. We distinguish "writer" from "rider" by having the same consonant (a flapped Spanish R) but a different vowel (I haven't got the IPA but in "writer" it's the upside-down U instead of a broad A in the diphthong) whereas you use the same vowel but a different consonant. (Most of your dialects don't flap intervocalic T and D like we do.)

I don't know how it is in British speech, but we Americans seem to be enraptured by strong verbs so the trend goes the other way. "Dove" for "dived" and "snuck" for "sneaked" are already in our dictionary and "drug" for "dragged" can't be far behind.

But those British spellings -OUR, -RE and -ISE are French!