I often wonder why some words were changed while (whilst) others were left alone. What about wise? Disguise? Rose? Hose? Shouldn't Americans spell them with a Zee too?
To partly answer your question sonny, Webster's plan for reforming English spelling only centred on 10 main classes of words":
1. "-our" to "-or"
2. "-re" to "-er"
3. dropping final "k" in "publick," etc.
4. changing "-ence" to "-ense" in "defence," etc.
5. use single "l" in inflected forms, e.g. "traveled"
6. use double "l" in words like "fulfill"
7. use "-or" for "-er" where done so in Latin, e.g. "instructor," "visitor"
8. drop final "e" to give: ax, determin, definit, infinit, envelop, medicin, opposit, famin, (others)
9. use single "f" at end of words like "pontif," "plaintif"
10. change "-ise" to "-ize" wherever this can be traced back to Latin and Greek (where a "zeta" was used in the spellings) or a more recent coining which uses the suffix "-ize" (from Greek "-izein")
Needless to say, clauses 8 and 9 didn't catch on, and clause 10 didn't affect words like "wise", "disguise", "rose" and "hose" because they're not from Greek. The reason he didn't want to push too far was because if he did, people would have been too hostile, and NONE of the changes would have been adopted...
... Oh yeah, and when we moved to southwest Louisiana, mom used to make us pay her for saying AX instead of ask. Don't ever start saying ax for ask because lemme done tell you somethin', it's HARD habit to break.
Funnily enough, the varient "axe" is as old as "ask". The verb in Old English was "ascian", which underwent a process of metathesis perhaps influenced by the Skandinavian (Viking) word "aeske". If this influence didn't take place the word would likely have evolved into "ash" or "esh", following the sound changes of other words*. "Axe" was an accepted literary form until about 1600. It was used in geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales... "I axe, hwy the fyfte man was nought housband to the Samaritan?" (Wife's Prologue 1386)
So don't feel guilty about using "ax" FlyingHigh, it's just as valid...
* In the
6th century the Anglo-Saxon sound cluster "sc" changed from [sk] to [sh] for an unknown reason... the invasion of the Norse/Vikings in
8th century reintroduced [sk] words into Old English giving us words that meant the same but were pronounced differently.
Scirt,
scatter, scip, sceull and
scin gave us the varients
shirt / skirt,
shatter / skatter, ship / skipper, shell / skull and
shin / skin)...
Eventually these words gradually diverged in meaning to become different words in their own right... (Guess what the Swedish word
"skit"
is in English? hehe
)
