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Archive for the ‘spelling’ Category

October 29th, 2012 - 1:50 pm § in alphabet, etymology, foreign language, japanese, language evolution, mysteries of english, spelling, vocabulary, word origins

Linguistics Link Love – Americanisms and Japanese Kanji

It’s been a while since I last wrote here! Over three years to be precise… I’m now 2900+ miles away from where I last posted from and in a very different place in my life. Fortunately, I still love words, and I want to share a few links I have found lately that might be […][...]

September 24th, 2009 - 5:56 pm § in mysteries of english, old english, plurals, spelling, word origins

How many nouns?

Nearly all nouns have different singular and plural forms. I have one cat; he has two cats. I ate five apples; he had one apple. Nouns with a plural and a singular form are called variable nouns. Most variable nouns form the plural by taking an -s at the end. The added -s is called […][...]

September 3rd, 2009 - 1:41 pm § in alphabet, orthography, spelling

The English Alphabet

Yesterday we saw how English spelling has changed over time. But what about the English alphabet? Have we always written in the same way? The answer is, of course, no – the alphabet has changed several times over the years. The earliest written texts we have of English were in Anglo-Saxon rune[...]

September 2nd, 2009 - 1:49 pm § in etymological spelling, etymology, mysteries of english, pronunciation, spelling

Renaissance Spelling

Did you ever wonder why English has such a strange spelling system? There are countless reasons for this, but borrowing another language’s spelling rules is a major one. Throughout history, it was been in fashion to borrow aspects of language and culture from other admired countries. In Renais[...]