Andrew Dunbar hippytrail@gmail.com wrote:
The etymology is also different.
Not really. I don't know about the languages I don't speak (i.e. everything apart from English, Japanese, French and a little Latin), but in general the spelling has little or nothing to do with the etymology.
Sometimes one spelling is definitely known to be derived from another and both remain in use in various places. For instance the Spanish word for "peanut" was borrowed from Nahuatl in Mexico as "cacahuate" but when it was later borrwed into Spain itself it became "cacahuete". It would be a shame to not have a way to record such things in the cases we do know them.
Indeed, but hopefully the area of the entry where spellings are given will be able to contain notes describing the who/what/where/why/when of the spelling-- tho thus far all I've heard about is the who, i.e. dialect and so-called authorities-- 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).
*Muke!