Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
and it won't have to be lumped in with the etymology, whose job is to explain the etymon or etyma of a word and shouldn't have to touch on spelling (unless perhaps to explain why a certain spelling came to be, but even that could be handled by an annotation to the spelling itself).
There are times when the etymology can be a guide to the spelling, especially when questions of double letters are involved. Thus "toroid" and not "torroid" or "millennium" rather than "millenium".
Yes, and sometimes the etymology is ignored in the reckoning of correct spelling, thus "island" and not "iland" and "thumb" rather than "thum". Etymology is never a proof of spelling, though it is one of the factors that influences it.[1] That's why I wrote that the etymology might _explain_ a spelling--I originally wrote that etymology could be used to suggest the correctness of one valid, accepted, or otherwise usual spelling over another, but removed that when I realized that kind of statement, while common in other dictionaries, would be POV-pushing and have no place in any Wiktionary: if a language already has a standard, we note that (and not attempt to change it), and if there is no standard it is not our place to instate one.
*Muke! [1] Others being: pronunciation, tradition, analogy (whence 'thumb'), folk etymology (whence 'island'), aligning with or varying from the practices of other nations, orthographic practices, etc.--all of which IMO are reasons why the reasons for the spellings' annotations to go with the spellings instead of all over the page.