Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 September 6
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September 6
edit-ou
editAre there any English words where final -ou represents /aʊ/ other than thou and the truncations thou ("thousand") and trou ("trousers")? 71.126.56.187 (talk) 14:53, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- This list of English words ending in "ou" are all fairly recent loan words except "you". Alansplodge (talk) 15:37, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- It is mostly the fault of the fact that ow has become the standard spelling when it is final. Originally (in Anglo-Saxon) it was spelled u and pronounced like the modern English oo in moon. But because English was influenced by French, it became ou when Middle English evolved, and u was used for the modern descendant of the French u sound that English lacks. Because of the Great Vowel Shift, ou in English (which comes from Anglo-Saxon long u) became the sound it has now in out, and for some unknown reason was re-spelled ow at the end of a word. Long u in English (which comes from Anglo-Norman long u) became the you sound, which is now often simplified to oo after certain consonants. Georgia guy (talk) 15:48, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- However, in the Black Country dialect of the English Midlands, "you" is pronounced "yow". Alansplodge (talk) 15:19, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
- It is mostly the fault of the fact that ow has become the standard spelling when it is final. Originally (in Anglo-Saxon) it was spelled u and pronounced like the modern English oo in moon. But because English was influenced by French, it became ou when Middle English evolved, and u was used for the modern descendant of the French u sound that English lacks. Because of the Great Vowel Shift, ou in English (which comes from Anglo-Saxon long u) became the sound it has now in out, and for some unknown reason was re-spelled ow at the end of a word. Long u in English (which comes from Anglo-Norman long u) became the you sound, which is now often simplified to oo after certain consonants. Georgia guy (talk) 15:48, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
Can I change Wikipedia so that articles appear in American English? If so, how?
editI use Wikipedia a lot. The articles contain British spelling. I wish to change the Wikipedia content to articles with American spelling. Is this possible and, if so, how do I do this?
Thank you. Bcgura (talk) 18:19, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English --Viennese Waltz 18:46, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- Since Wikipedia does not use slang, it should be fairly easy to program a browser extension (a person I saw online in one weekend both learned the Chrome extension tools and made a basic version of this) or even, if your only interest is Wikipedia, your own customized CSS stylesheet, with UK-to-US replacement rules encoded.
- As a template, you can view the source of Josh May's javascript tool (the javascript is linked in the webpage source, and the replacement dictionary is linked from that) and then tinker from there. (Also, be sure run the javascript source through a code beautifier to make it readable.) SamuelRiv (talk) 18:55, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
- There are of course a lot of hazards and edge cases in doing this. Many names would be respelled, such as Victoria Arbour, various place names, and band names such as Living Colour. Exceptions such as Broadway theatre would be incorrectly corrected. Some differences are grammatical, for instance bath can be a verb in Br Eng, and that one would be left unchanged. I was also trying to come up with an ambiguity such as rearise, which could sometimes be parsed as re-arise, but at other times be equivalent to Am Eng *rearize, meaning "to make more rear". Fortunately that's not a word. Card Zero (talk) 05:20, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- Some respelling errors can be avoided by not touching terms that are not in the lower case expected for a common noun in sentence case; these are probably proper nouns. You also don't want to touch literal quotations, like Churchill's "Here indeed was the Irish spectre—horrid and inexorcisable!"[1] Next to grammatical differences there are also lexical ones, e.g. British English boot (of a car) versus American English trunk. --Lambiam 07:22, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- Is it really that hard to read British spelling? Alansplodge (talk) 12:18, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- Some respelling errors can be avoided by not touching terms that are not in the lower case expected for a common noun in sentence case; these are probably proper nouns. You also don't want to touch literal quotations, like Churchill's "Here indeed was the Irish spectre—horrid and inexorcisable!"[1] Next to grammatical differences there are also lexical ones, e.g. British English boot (of a car) versus American English trunk. --Lambiam 07:22, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- There are of course a lot of hazards and edge cases in doing this. Many names would be respelled, such as Victoria Arbour, various place names, and band names such as Living Colour. Exceptions such as Broadway theatre would be incorrectly corrected. Some differences are grammatical, for instance bath can be a verb in Br Eng, and that one would be left unchanged. I was also trying to come up with an ambiguity such as rearise, which could sometimes be parsed as re-arise, but at other times be equivalent to Am Eng *rearize, meaning "to make more rear". Fortunately that's not a word. Card Zero (talk) 05:20, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- Have you tried Conservapedia? Noting their policy on spelling. -- Verbarson talkedits 20:53, 7 September 2024 (UTC)
- Our article on Noah Webster contains the statement "Webster viewed language as a means to control disruptive thoughts. His American Dictionary emphasized the virtues of social control over human passions and individualism." This seems a good reason to deploy multicultural orthography.
- We also have an article on Ethnic Cleansing for those who demand racial purity in Wikipedian spelling. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 06:18, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
- Though I'm unclear how in practice teaching people to spell words like rumor, skunk, apothegm, donut, and gray mustache fiber was supposed to improve their manners. Card Zero (talk) 07:47, 8 September 2024 (UTC)
- I wonder if the OP can handle the spelling of the Space Shuttle Endeavour? HiLo48 (talk) 15:17, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
- Takes me back to when the British and the French jointly developed a supersonic aircraft. The British called it "Concord", the French "Concorde". In the spirit of the entente cordiale, the latter spelling was amicably agreed. 2A02:C7B:223:9900:6CC3:8F33:6056:E8EA (talk) 15:22, 16 September 2024 (UTC)