The history of, and explanations for, the varieties of names for Beijing ('northern capital') is so complex and detailed that it gets its own wikipedia page:
To the Burmese, the word "Myanmar" represents the oppressive and insane dictator who overthrew a democratic society to institute a communism that nobody wanted, keeping Burma in the dark ages for decades. One of the dictatorial general's feats as he rose to power was quashing civil unrest and rival communist movements among the minority tribes of Burma, and "Myanmar" is the name of the majority ethnicity. You can understand that people remain a little sore about the name change.
"Burma" is an English corruption of the Yangonese word for "Myanmar", but to the Burmese democratic movement--and the many minority tribes--the word represents an ethnicity-neutral name for the entire country.
Might be interesting to graph all these next to editor or leadership changes, as well as style guide revisions. Or actually, current events, now that I look at some of the years where it's been sharpest.
It's "programme" in British-English for everything except "computer program" (in my experience). Probably because most programmer-culture is centred in North America.
I imagine that it's simply some NYT writer(s) using the British-English spelling, rather than a wider cultural trend, unless somebody is aware of any other examples?
"The international name Constantinople also remained in use until the Turkish Postal Service Law of March 28, 1930, according to which all foreign countries were asked to solely use the name Istanbul also in their languages and their postal service networks."
Compare that to Myanmar / Burma, who also ask people to use the Myanmar form. Since it's not a democratic government there is some resistance to the new name.
The first of these is still spelled æsthetic in some places. The general convention in US spelling of replacing æ and œ with e seems more jarring to me than other differences in orthography between US and commonwealth English
I can't run the nytlabs thing because a) windows phone, and b) when I try to enter æ I get another character... (potentially see (a))
It's typically spelled aesthetic in American English nowadays (without the ligature). In that one the NYT was a hold-out in the other direction: esthetic never overtook aesthetic in general American usage, though for a period in the 20th century it looked like it might (encyclopedia did definitively displace encyclopaedia). It looks like the NYT wholesale made the ae->e switch around 1920, and then in the case of aesthetic finally realized it wasn't going to happen, and reverted to common usage in 2000.
I have no idea how general this is, but in my experience the split appears to be on philosophy (aesthetics) vs beauty salon (esthetician) lines. I've seen the ae spelling used for the latter but not the e spelling for the former.
I love this stuff. One thing I miss about no longer working at Microsoft is the site license for OED
These words aren't German borrowings, so that isn't related at all. The ae in this class of words is from Latin æ (ultimately from Greek αι). The ae->e shift was an attempt at spelling simplification, to remove some vestigial Latinisms, but only partially succeeded.
True, although I believe than in itself is only a slightly older (circa 1900) spelling reform. In older German books, you see Aesthetik/aesthetische/etc. instead. Lots of borrowing and adaptation...
What this shows is the old NY Times house style oddity where they described CDs as "compact disks" rather than using the trademark Compact Disc. (Pre-1980, it is not clear to me.)
True. The NYT editorial standards have always been downright bullheaded, even with trademarks ("I.B.M.") where they have no authority to contradict anyone else's usage.
The Google Books dataset suggests the crossover point was around 1905 in AmE, but not until the late 1970s in BrE (modulo the usual caveats about how their data isn't necessarily a representative sample):
Some history: "Corea" was more common in the English speaking world for the territory we call Korea today. At some point during the Japanese colonial period, as Japan solidified its ownership of the territory, the preferred spelling in English speaking countries became "Korea". ("Corea" is still used in many other languages and neither the Koreans nor the Japanese use Korea or Corea when talking about the peninsula).
There's a conspiracy theory that one of the cultural suppression activities the Japanese colonial government took part in (along with forcible language conversion and various geomanctic engineering efforts like driving thousands of iron poles into the ground at traditional seats of Korean power and moving entrance gates to palaces to break the flow of Chi) was broadcasting out to the world that "Korea" was the preferred spelling since it put Korea after Japan in alphabetized lists of countries in English speaking territories.
More pragmatically, both spellings were used up until the 20th century. But Korea was relatively unknown in the West outside of mild curiosity. The actual popularization of one spelling over the other seems to be the result of writings on Korea by the U.S. missionary and later consul general at the time, Horace Newton Allen, who exclusively used "Korea" when writing about the country.
This spelling was picked up and at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, the exhibit listed both spellings as correct, but people were generally told that "Korea" was the preferred spelling. Allen was heavily involved in the planning of the exhibit.
On the graph here, you can see that Korea wasn't a topic at all in the NYTs reporting until directly after the exhibition, which seems to have been successful in bringing attention to the country. But the more familiar "Corea" was used until 1897, when it was pretty much dropped in favor or "Korea".
Interest stayed low until the Korean war after which the amount of reporting on the country steadily increased.
The secondary peaks 2-4 years out are interesting. Or perhaps it's better conceptualized as troughs the year after. Wonder what the reason is for that?
Thats clever! The longer a year has gone, the less likely you will say "last year", "one year ago", "two years ago" and rather go for the years "full name" like "2014". This could be a reason for the revivals.
Another difference in usage between British English and American English: In the US, you go to a movie theater to see a film. Or you go to the theater to see a play.
In the UK, you go to a cinema to see a film. Going to the theatre is understood to mean going to see a play/musical/performing arts.
This is exactly what I have been trying to achieve with my CutSpel Chrome extension - so far not too much interest, but I might try another submission in a little while.
I'd argue there's a vast difference between using two different, accepted spellings of a word, and using a Chrome extension that alters English words, transforming them into not English words.
I think you might have misunderstood what cutspel is trying to achieve. This is the same thing as what NYT did by choosing a different spelling - that is to reform English spelling through familiarity with a new spelling. It worked for theater so why not other words.
The text on the page after modification by cutspel is still English - just more rationaly spelt.
I could have really used Chronicle in high school english (1987) - I was constantly getting essays handed back with the accusation that I was making up words (said evidence being the lack of the words in my English instructor's somewhat dated dictionary).
"Horrific" was one that always got me in trouble - though, apparently, it is a somewhat new word.
I was just puzzling about this the other day. I live in the USA and I've always spelled the word as theatre. Only recently, I've noticed that spellcheck is balking at this.
It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong and I don't really mind that my country wants to spell it differently.
> It's somewhat comforting to know that my way of spelling the word isn't wrong
It might even be more comforting to know that your way is actually more correct, in a traditionalist sense: the Anglo-French theatre comes directly from Greek théatron (through Latin thĕātrum). Somehow "your country" is bent on morphing the word for whatever reason, similarly to what they are doing to center/centre.
It's not really accurate to say the US is the one doing the morphing. Before the early 19th century, both spellings of most of these words were acceptable in the UK and the US, because these words came into English both from French and from Latin. It's more accurate to say that the UK and the US, when each settled on one of the two spellings as standard, chose to settle differently.
This standardization in the US was greatly influenced by Noah Webster and his dictionary. He tended to go with the spelling variant that fit more with how the word was pronounced. His dictionary was influential enough to make those spellings dominant in the US. Those spellings then came to be seen as Americanisms in the UK (even though they had long been acceptable UK spellings...), and so the UK standardized on the other spellings.
Webster was also an advocate of spelling simplification, and was responsible for dropping the 'k' from 'musick' and 'publick', and those were picked up in the UK.
Or somehow Britain and its overseas colonies didn't have any standardized spelling for words for a long time, and so spellings fell in and out of favor and whatever was in vogue in each place at the time the earliest widely-accepted dictionaries were compiled became the "right" spelling for that location.
(speaking of which, Commonwealth English has a stronger tendency to hypercorrect and create false spellings which actually differ from the imagined root; "foetus" is the classic example, since the Latin root was actually just "fetus")
I've always used theatre myself. I always believed that it depended largely on when you first encountered the word in school. If you came of age in the fifties or sixties that was the common spelling of the word. I can even remember movie theatres, pre multiplexes spelling it that way. If you're younger and spell it as theatre then you're an Anglophile;<).
These swaps are clearly "non-organic" (i.e. didn't emerge from gradual changes in colloquial language). Are they the result of a change in editing staff? Spelling correction software?
Are the style guides updated to reflect the public use of these words? If so, I imagine if we were to graph the change in use over time in the public would be a much more gradual and organic one?
Yep, as the Google N-Gram view in the article shows, usage of "theater" overtook "theater" in the late 1970s, but the two had quite similar usage rates from the 1940s onwards.
Style guides generally update to represent the editorial team's preferences, to reflect changes in the wider world (e.g. see the comment in this thread about "Constaninople"→"Istanbul", or to make a point (see the New Yorker's continued use of diaresis in coöperation etc.[1])
"In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words."
I've always heard the distinction being that "theater" is general and applies more to movie theaters whereas "theatre" was more specifically stage plays.
Something I've noticed (anecdotally) over the past few years in the USA is the switch from the term 'cell phone' to 'mobile phone'. Here in the UK we've used the term 'mobile phone' exclusively I think for the past 20 or 30 years.
As an aside, my web dev company runs about 10 web sites for theatre companies and all of them spell their names ending in 're' while the venues they play at spell their names ending in 'er'.
The first time we signed up one of these companies, I asked about the spelling and was given the same history as outlined in the article. With the second company that signed us, we mis-typed theatre and were taken to the woodshed for making the error.
So we are used to spelling it as theatre in the correct use of the word and are surprised the NY Times has not for many years.
Edit:
Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Archaeology.archeology
A very early switch: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=Toward.towards
Another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=catalogue.catalog
And another: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=centre.center
A weaker one: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=fibre.fiber