American spelling takes the spotlight here. Mencken establishes a division between the two orthographies, charting both American and English word-spellings by the following criteria: 1) The omission of the penultimate u in words ending in -our; 2) The reduction of duplicate consonants to single consonants; 3) The omission of a redundant e; 4) The change of terminal -re into -er; 5) The omission of unaccented foreign terminations; 6) The omission of u when combined with a or o; 7) The conversion of decayed diphthongs into simple vowels; 8) The change of compound consonants into simple consonants; 9) The change of o into a; 10) The change of e into i; 11) The change of y into a, ia or i; 12) The change of c into s; 13) The substitution of s for.....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 367 words. This
study guide contains 36,636 words (approx. 122 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our The American Language Access Pass.
