On 21/09/2007, Michael Daly <michaeldaly(a)kayakwiki.org> wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
There are no right and wrong spellings for
English, certainly,
Try telling that to a spell checker!
There are several right and wrong spellings in English - they are just
country dependent. Correct spelling in Britain is not the same as in
America. Canada uses some US and some UK spellings, just to make things
complicated (and the so-called Canadian spell checker from Mozilla is
just a relabelled UK spell checker that is just plain wrong for some
words. No doubt a bright idea from some yank or brit who didn't know
there was a difference.)
That's not actually the point I was making. There is not *official*
correct spelling for English. Sure, there are plenty of dictionaries,
but none of them (at least not in Britain) are state sponsored as
official. English spellings are determined by what people use, nothing
more, nothing less. In some (probably many) other languages, spellings
are determined by what a certain committee, or academy or whatever
decides is a good spelling.