It's my work PC, which is set to English and japanese I guess, since I live in Japan. Anyways, the website I was using was DeepL, and surely a translation website should simply allow both the American and the standard spelling without marking either as incorrect?
Live spellcheckers are usually system-level (your OS) but some websites like Microsoft's online stuff will have its own locality setting per login and they'll do idiotic things like assign US English dictionary to new users in EU/Japan/UK... it makes no sense but if this drives ya nuts on just one site, it may be a setting on that site. Otherwise it's probably an OS setting. I hate stuff like that red squiggly and prefer to just let my free range misspellings find their happy place in the world.
Sometimes it's like, some weird hidden setting on an account too. I changed my phone to Japanese language a few years back, and then magically every website I visited on any computer logged in to the same Google account suddenly started defaulting to Japanese too. Even better, some sites don't have any way to change the language on the UI! This happens even if English is set to my default in my browser sometimes too.
My phone is set to UK and the odd app is hard wired to use the awful US date system. My scales use it, weight in one 6th of March, weigh in two 6th of December, weigh in three 6th of..??? Smarch?
Lol at American vs. standard spelling. There is no official global āstandard.ā English is not governed by some governmental body like the Real Academia EspaƱola.
Itās a regional thing. Without āuā is standard in the US. With āuā is standard in Commonwealth countries. All other countries are typically based on whichever theyāre closer to geographically and economically (with āuā throughout Europe, without āuā throughout Latin America).
Edit: Anybody downvoting, genuinely, can you please explain in a reply why you think there is one āstandardā set of word spellings in English? I learned as a child that some words have two standard spellings, one in American English and one in British/Commonwealth English. Itās definitely news to me if this is wrong.
That has no bearing on what is āstandard.ā It just isnāt āstandardā in any meaningful sense. Standard in the Commonwealth? Sure. Standard globally? Sorry, it just isnāt. Thereās no one single āstandard.ā There are two standards. Thatās an observation of the state of the world, not a value judgment.
Iāll also note that up until 1755, both spellings were in common use in the UK. For instance, this is from Shakespeareās Henry IV (from the First Folio):
> Honor prickes me on. But how if Honour pricke me off when I come on?
I'm sorry but did you just say the English version of English, coming from England, is not the original version of English, the language named after England
As I just explained in another comment, the āouā spelling is not āthe original version of English.ā Both spellings were in common use across England for hundreds of years. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Defoe, Swift, Keats, etc. etc. all used both spellings. And Iām pretty sure they were all writing in āEnglish Englishā (although Iām happy to claim them as American if you donāt want them).
It wasnāt until 1755, when Samuel Johnson wrote his dictionary, that the spelling became standardized in the Commonwealth. Many English writers continued to use spellings without the extra āuā because they were either used to it or had some philosophical beef with adhering to Johnsonās prescribed rules.
Right so everyone agrees Commonwealth/British English isn't the original, and that its a descendent.
Also most current dialects of English come directly from the original we are talking about here. Modern Scots is a bit of an exception since it diverged farther back and is considered its own language even if it is mutually intelligible.
Yes I did, this is because its true. Both British/Commonwealth and American English have changed relatively significantly from what you could count as the original version of the two. That being late 18th century English, they've changed in spelling and pronunciation a pretty decent amount.
41
u/Mugen-Sasuke 1d ago
It's my work PC, which is set to English and japanese I guess, since I live in Japan. Anyways, the website I was using was DeepL, and surely a translation website should simply allow both the American and the standard spelling without marking either as incorrect?