Franc Zabkar wrote:
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

Get done with this, there is also the Australian brand of English just
as there deep south English in the states. You can't make a war out of
nothing.
Bill Baka