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So I've finally figured out where another of my spelling/pronunciation variants comes from ("towards", or any other "X-wards"; as opposed to the "-ward" variants). According to Jeremy Smith's American-British/British-American dictionary it's a Britishism. (As for "acrosst", "amongst", and the like the jury's still out. Jeremy Smith lists them as uncommon Americanisms but who knows.)
Long ago, deep in the annals of my childhood, I couldn't spell my own name to save my life. Then one day I started learning Latin and my spelling improved dramatically. Then at some point in the course of college I noticed that I'd started unintentionally picking up a number of Britishisms: using -our instead of -or ("colour", "armour",...), using -ise instead of -ize ("emphasise", "realise"...), etc. I don't think my vocabulary changed overmuch--I didn't start referring to the boot or bonnet of autos or anything like--but my spelling certainly did.
Now, I do intentionally try to alter the way that I speak and write, mind; but this was not one of those intentional changes, this just sort of started happening. Whenever I went to type, that's what came out. (I blame the schools!) More recently I've finally started telling my spellchecker to correct those to the standard American spelling. The spellchecker has a "British English" choice amongst the list of languages to presume the text in question is a vaguely intelligible sample of, but I'm not trying to pose as a Brit and so I'm unwilling to go that far.
But I've noticed some other changes in my spelling recently, and none of them are at all good. It seems that without the constant regimentation of Latin exercises I'm reverting to my old unspellable self. But it's interesting where this problem is showing up. Almost entirely with vowels, and predominantly around morpheme boundaries. So for example, coming from "necessary", is it "necessarily" or "necessarally"? From "derive" is it "derivible" or "derivable" (or "deriveable" as sometimes happens)?
Part of this no doubt stems from the fact that these alternate ways of adding the same morpheme are all pronounced exactly the same thanks to vowel reduction. There are some vague general rules (like "STEM-e + a-END" => "STEM-i-END") but they aren't always followed (cf. "traceable", "pronounceable", "salable", "notable", "decidable",... "probably", "unfortunately",...), and indeed they seem not to be followed more often than they are followed. And there are other rules ("STEM-c + ly" => "STEM-cally") which make no sense at all to the pronunciation of anyone I know (though there may exist some poor affect-ed kid in the world who might be saying "basic-uh-ly", "intrinsic-uh-ly", "historic-uh-ly", and the like), though at least they're easy to remember.
Unfortunately, it's not limited only to when adding suffixes to words. It seems my brain's decided that there's some sort of vowel harmony thing going on-- that is, for the non-linguists in the crowd, there are a number of words where all the vowels sound the same (or similar) and of a sudden I've decided that they must be written the same way. This happens the most with words which only have Es and As all of which are reduced to the same sound, e.g. "apparent" (or "sentence", though it has the same vowels, or "variant" even though it has that I in there), and tends to greatly compound my issues with the suffixes when those suffixes begin with E or A.
While not particularly opposed to the idea, I all too often explore the realist side of my personality when people suggest a spelling reform of English. English spelling is actually remarkably more regular than it may at first seem, as shown by-- oh buggerall, why'd that site have to go and vanish? Well, you'll have to take my word for it. Most people who've suggested spelling reforms try taking it to the logical extreme hoping to get us to a one-symbol/one-sound mapping. To a certain extent that is impossible, and it is certainly unreasonable if you actually want someone to accept your reform and have a language that at all resembles English on the page. Any reform that has a snowball's chance of being accepted will have to err on the side of not going far enough I'm afraid.
That said, if a spelling reform were to happen the biggest changes would have to be with the vowels, and that aloen will meik eenglish look very different no matter hou cloes yu trai tu keep tu the original spellings and add ruels for the lesser sound cheinges such as "the" having a sound laik "a" ("uh" not "ei") or "under", or "o" at the end of a word alwais beeing proenounced as in "groess" (~"disgusting") and never as in "on". I'm sure with some scholarly inquiry into the underlying phonemes of English vowels one could to a lot better than I have, but there's a serious problem in that English actually has nine- to eleven-odd vowels (not including diphthongs) rather than five and that we only occasionally try to indicate half of these by a "silent e" which all too often disappears when we add a suffix to a word. Not even to mention the massive overuse of certain vowel digraphs (like the quaint "cow", "sow", "plow",... "bow", "grow", "stow",...; or the more varied, "hood", "good", "soot", "cook"... "boot", "shoot",... "blood"; let alone the estimable, "house", "blouse",... "ought",... "sour", "flour",... "could",... "previous",... "though",... "through",... "scourge",... "your",... ...).
End transmission.
