> Why did American spelling split from British? The words color/colour, marvelous/marvellous and traveler/traveller to name but a few are so odd, it's weird that this should have happened. One explanation that I can think of is just long separation from each other made the two nations develop slightly differently, but really, America wasn't founded THAT long ago (in linguistic terms).

It's all due to the (ahem) ceaseless efforts of a certain American lobbyist who was also the well-known 'compendiumist', Noah Webster. In the early 1800s, he proposed a myriad of orthographical reforms for American English, most of which were never adopted. He was known as a "linguistic anarchist." One of the things that Webster successfully insisted upon was that written English ought to be pruned of excess like the silent u's in honour, humour, colour, flavour; and the doubled consonants in traveller, waggon, etc. He also managed to eliminate the k from musick and publick. And the final two letters in the British spelling of theatre, centre, and chambre and others were switched to the American form, -er. On the syntactical front, Webster was responsible for promoting the grammatical rule against using split infinitives in English. (The rule is stupid only because English is NOT Latin). Finally, because Noah was also extremely touchy about taboo and curse words, he is remembered as one of the first to publish an expurgated and 'clean' version of the Bible.

Well, philbee, does all THAT explains things? While I sympathize with Noah's recognition that English could use some general spelling reform -- it's one of the more difficult written languages for school children to learn -- I'm not happy with the willy-nilly lexical-pruning philosophy that led to such atrocities such as writing 'thru' for 'through.' I'm still debating the spelling of 'lite' instead of 'light.'


> Another possible explanation is that America didn't want to be associated with Britain after the War of Independence (Quebec uses very different French to France for this reason, using "chien chaud" instead of "hot-dog".)

In large part, Quebec uses a different French from France because the original settlers sent over to Canada (Nouvelle France) were from the north of France. Many of them were peasants who had no pretentions to the "formal French" of Provençal. Incidentally, France uses the term 'hot-dog' because using English is still "le chic" in France, although it seems they're getting their share of pro-French language purists over there, too.

Wolf "uses British spelling" spirit