On Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:47:02 -0600, Chris Barts
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Franc Zabkar writes:

On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 18:16:32 +0100, "Fleetie"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Bloody hell!

It's an English vs. American English thing.

English uses "labelled", and is of course the correct one.


Martin

I was recently watching a spelling bee on TV. It occurred to me that
such a contest must seem very silly to those viewers whose mother
tongue is phonetic, as all languages should be. English could have
become phonetic many centuries ago, when the language came under
formal review

This never happened, and I'm not entirely clear on what you mean
here. What is 'formal review' in this context? Who was doing the
reviewing? What authority did they have?

, but the traditionalists triumphed over the
phoneticists,

No, there were no such camps. There have been various attempts to
reform English orthography championed by people such as Noah Webster,
Thomas Jefferson, George Bernard Shaw, and others, but none of them
have caught on among the great majority of people who use the
language.

Last year I watched an episode of Melvin Bragg's History of English on
SBS TV in Australia. The narrator spoke of a period in the history of
the language where there existed several different spellings for the
one word (eg kirk, church, churche, cherche, chyrch, etc). Primarily
for legal reasons, there was an attempt at standardisation by
"traditionalists" in one camp and proponents of phonetics in another.
Unfortunately the traditionalists prevailed. IIRC this occurred around
the time when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. I can't find
any definitive Google references, though.

- Franc Zabkar
--
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