Episodes in the archaeology of spelling
Image: public domain
Spelling in the English language can sometimes seem a very arbitrary proposition. Aside from the peculiarities within the language itself, there’s the long list of variations between US and British/Australian usage.
Often it’s just the Americans making things simpler by sensibly cutting out redundant vowels (analog/analogue, color/colour, paediatric/pediatric), or de-Frenchifying the ending (center, theater, liter, etc.), but sometimes there’s a deeper structural distinction revealed in those spelling choices.
One of the most notable is the -ise/-ize ending in words such as organise, recognise or generalise. The -ise ending is the accepted Australian and British usage, with the Americans opting for a closer match to the sound that actually comes out of your mouth when you use (or should I say ‘uze’?) a word such as ‘categorize’ by spelling it with a zed (or ‘zee’, I suppose). Interestingly, however, that bastion of linguistic rectitude, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), renders the -ize ending as its standard. The OED explains this is because the -ize ending is the original usage, going back some 500 years and deriving from the Greek verb ending -izo, with -ise only appearing in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Spelling is like archaeology. As you follow words back through time, tracing their evolution to older languages, their meanings become clearer and we find we can apply knowledge gained in one area to cast light on another. It’s one thing to know that genuflect comes from the Latin for knee (genu), but an extraordinary world opens up when we learn that the word genuine comes from the act of a Roman father acknowledging paternity of a child by placing him or her upon his knee.
