Elaine Chaika's Blog

That's intriguing. I'd never thought about it in terms of identity. Here I thought it was about the tomatoes!

If spelling reform became a serious issue, someone in North Carolina would propose a constitutional amendment to block it.

Gil

The word klu(d)ge 'workaround' has an interesting history too: see the Wikipedia article.

I think you must have misread "German" for "Germanic". The OED2 says that talk, stalk, lurk are frequentatives of tell, steal 'move quietly', lour/lower; all of them have cognates throughout Germanic. The last of these means 'lie in wait' in the other Germanic languages, but only 'frown' in English. The OED's etymologies often don't look past Middle English unless the Old English word was substantially different in sense, so there's ever...

Elaine: Did you search in Google Scholar? It's a much better search engine for scholarly books and articles than either mainstream Google or the fairly limited search tools provided by electronic publishers like JSTOR.

Brenda: "AND" is no longer necessary. Searching for ["Adam Gerber" "World War II"] will get what you want (I write the square brackets for clarification; you don't have to type them.) You can also use | for OR and - for NOT. Google will some...

Ironically, Jim's wuz shows that he uses the STRUT vowel rather than the then-standard LOT vowel in was. A century and a half later, STRUT has completely taken over in American English.

Indeed, the Scots translation of the Pooh books calls the donkey Heehaw, Scots being a rhotic language variety. The other characters are Pooh, Wee Grumphie, Rabbit (not a native word in either English or Scots), Hoolet (cf. English (h)owlet), Kanga, Bairn Roo, and Teeger.

"Thae notices had been written oot by Christopher Robin, the ainly yin in the Forest that could spell; for, lang-heidit though Hoolet wis in mony weys, able tae read and write and spell his ain name HOOTEL, for some reas...

It now looks like what has really happened with write/right and wry/rye is not that /w/ has been lost, but that all initial /r/ in English is now labialized! Look in a mirror, or feel your lips as you say wry, awry. If you're like me, the first is labialized but the second is not — another case to add to the traditional inventory of English positional allophones. So wreally it is /r/ > /wr/, not /wr/ > /r/.

See the writeup at John Wells's blog.

Drempt, with intrusive /p/. Leaned. Strived.

Neil Gaiman, the author of American Gods is English; it's not surprising that he makes mistakes in writing American English.

Rubber bands, fireflies, dragonflies, washcloth, water fountain, bag or purse, grocery bag (whether paper, plastic, or fabric) or just bag in context.

I was born in 1958 just outside the New York City isogloss bundle, and have been living in NYC for the last 30 years.

As yoo probably know, there hav bin hundreds of attempts to reform Inglish spelling. In my opinion, the best of these is Regularized Inglish, developed in the first haf of the 20th century by Axel Wijk. It aims not to make English totally regular, but to make it about as regular as French — that is, there are many rules but only a handful of exceptions, and while you still need to lern to spell, lerning to read is much easier.

Wijk analyzed the existing spellings of Inglish in fine detail to d...