Assume v. Presume

Mike0001 said:
As in island?
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Do you know of anywhere that lists other words that had their spelling changed at about the same time due to their perceived origins (correctly or not)?

Debt, Doubt, Receipt, Indict, Phlegm, Diarrhea, Anthony, Salmon, Falcon and People being some other examples.

I was told when at Junior school that the extra letters suggested for the 'better' spellings in the 16th Century were readily used by scribs of the day who would be paid according to the length of text that they wrote. I've never since heard or read of that reason for the spelling changes being taken up but it sort of makes sense.
 
I have a problem with your perceived "diara" - a bad example I think.

My understanding of this is that the spellings represent the pronunciations the words once had, before the population corrupted the pronounciations by laziness. If you think of the way a "toff" (with educate speech) might say something, it is generally nearer the way a word is spelt than the way commoners say it.
 
Black Hole said:
But there is no alternative spelling for "island".
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Iland got corrupted into Island. There is no necessity for an s whatsoever. We don't even pronounce the s. Its etymology is totally independent of that of isle, which comes from Latin insula. Ile sounds a better alternative.

As for hiccough, it is another example of false etymology, someone thinking hiccup was a mistaken misspelling of something with a cough in it! Unfortunately, it caught on.
 
This got me wondering and searching. I found this which states hiccup came first.

hiccup (n.) 1570s, hickop, earlier hicket, hyckock, "a word meant to imitate the sound produced by the convulsion of the diaphragm" [Abram Smythe Farmer, "Folk-Etymology," London, 1882]. Cf. Fr. hoquet, Dan. hikke, etc. Modern spelling first recorded 1788; An Old English word for it was ælfsogoða, so called because hiccups were thought to be caused by elves.

hiccough 1620s, variant of hiccup (q.v.) by mistaken association with cough.


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That's because I can never remember how to spell it myself. I was more concerned with the assertion that all those letters are silent!
 
af123 said:
That's the American spelling IIRC. The one that jumped out at me was "falcon"
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Yeah. So the Merkins call it a "facon"? Perhaps this came from the G Bush Jnr Dictionary of American English.

BBC Breakfast: apparently, hundreds of thousands of people go to Chatsworth every year. Aren't they bored with it by now?
 
Hundreds of thousands is a but imprecise - 644,817 visitors in 2013 down 2.2% so 14,505 did not go back.

Math in the morning - better than a coffee
 
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Just think of all those people who are killed on our roads every year. They must be feeling fed up by now, over 1,700 of them.

At one time, the four of us went to Chatsworth every week, but that's what having two young children does to you. In those days it was only open from Easter to the end of the summer.
 
af123 said:
That's the American spelling IIRC.
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Oops! I was using an American instead of UK or no spellchecker at the time I posted.

Black Hole said:
I have a problem with your perceived "diara" - a bad example I think.
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The spelling is reported as 'diaria' pre to the spelling changes that were based on the perceived etymology from Latin and Greek.

af123 said:
The one that jumped out at me was "falcon"
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The explanation for that one is that the pronunciation has been influenced by the newer spelling.

Black Hole said:
My understanding of this is that the spellings represent the pronunciations the words once had, before the population corrupted the pronounciations by laziness.
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Are you seriously claiming never to have heard of the spelling changes that English underwent in the 16th and 17th Centuries due to perceived 'correctness' when its spelling was compared to the Latin and Greek spellings?
 
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