On 21/09/2007, Michael Daly michaeldaly@kayakwiki.org wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
There are no right and wrong spellings for English, certainly,
Try telling that to a spell checker!
There are several right and wrong spellings in English - they are just country dependent. Correct spelling in Britain is not the same as in America. Canada uses some US and some UK spellings, just to make things complicated (and the so-called Canadian spell checker from Mozilla is just a relabelled UK spell checker that is just plain wrong for some words. No doubt a bright idea from some yank or brit who didn't know there was a difference.)
That's not actually the point I was making. There is not *official* correct spelling for English. Sure, there are plenty of dictionaries, but none of them (at least not in Britain) are state sponsored as official. English spellings are determined by what people use, nothing more, nothing less. In some (probably many) other languages, spellings are determined by what a certain committee, or academy or whatever decides is a good spelling.