Backstory of the spelling of that word:
Latin colōrem (accusative of color) gets inherited by Old French as color /ko’lor/.
Somewhere down the line Old French shifted /o/ to /u/. I believe this shift affected at first stressed vowels, or that the distinction between unstressed /o/ and /u/ was already not a big deal; so there was more pressure to respell the last (stressed) vowel than the first (unstressed) one. So the word gets spelled color, colour, colur.
Anglo-Norman inherited this mess, spelling it mostly as colur. Then Middle English borrows the word, as /ku.'lu:r/~/'ku.lur/. It’s oxytone in AN, but English has a tendency to shift the stress to the first vowel, creating the second pronunciation. Spelling as usual for those times is a mess:
- colur - spelled like in Anglo-Norman.
- color - swap the ⟨u⟩ with cosmetic ⟨o⟩. Scribes hated spelling ⟨u⟩ in certain situations, where it would lead to too many vertical lines in a row; that’s why you also got come, love, people instead of cume, luve, peuple.
- colour - mirroring an Old French spelling that was more common up south, around Paris.
- coloure - that ⟨e⟩ was likely never pronounced, I think it was there to force reading the previous vowel as long
- coler - probably from some /'ku.lur/ pronunciation already reducing the vowel to */'ku.lər/
- kolour - ⟨c⟩~⟨k⟩ mixing was somewhat common then. And no, KDE did not exist back then, they did no lobby to spell the word with a K for the sake of a program that would only appear centuries later (Kolourpaint).
Eventually as English spelling gets standardised, the word settles down as colour.
Then around 1800, Noah Webster treats this word as if it was directly borrowed from Latin. Since in Latin it’s color, he clipped the -u. And his dictionary was popular in USA, recreating the mess, even after it was already fixed.
Ah you mean Simplified English?
Love how Steam includes English (Simplified) as a language choice with the American flag next to it.
isn"t that just a meme?
No their use of English is genuinely horrific.
Come again?
You know I was reasonably sure it did that, but now I’m questioning it myself. I’m not going to spin up a Windows VM so I’ll just take this on the chin and apologise for potential misinformation.
dug out a youtube video from 5 months ago that showed how to install steam in windows 11; it has no flags and only labels for the Language Setting. But that screenshot also came from Windows 7 or even Vista, so maybe they actually did that back then? I dunno. But its on knowyourmeme.
A simple language for simple people.
Aluminum.
What’s colour? My autocorrect doesn’t know what this is either
You guys added the U to color way after you made it be “color” to begin with. Aluminum is the original British spelling. Fahrenheit isn’t American it’s British. Need we go on?
Oh. Wow. So we are the superior English? Fascinating.
Our accents are also closer to old british before the poshies messed it into clownspeak.
It’s not that, it’s just that the accents in Britain and America diverged, with some of the most major changes being English becoming non-rhotic in a lot of England (this also carried over to America in some New England accents and AAVE)
There’s nothing inherently “posh” about Southern English accents, it’s just that Americans often perceive Brits as posh for historical reasons
In addition to all of that, since your comment is spot on:
When people claim some variety is more conservative than another variety, they tend to cherry pick a lot. It’s easy, for example, to look at rhoticity and claim “American English” is more conservative, or to look at the cot/caught merge and claim British English is more conservative. But neither claim is accurate or meaningful; and when you try to look at the big picture, you notice changes everywhere.
To complicate it further, neither “British English” nor “American English” refer to any actual variety. Those are only umbrella terms; they boil down to “English, arbitrarily restricted to people who live in the territory controlled by that specific government”. And the actual varieties that they speak might keep or change completely different features.
