US spellings

[desperance]

My remarkably good friend moshui finds himself quandarised caught on the horns of a quandary, and you know how uncomfortable that can be.

His copy-editor has recast his new fantasy novel in American spelling; which is not unreasonable on the face of it, its having an American publisher and hence inevitably a largely American audience. But Dan is a Brit to his boots, and his English is exceedingly British, and he's just not comfortable with this strange accent it's been pressed into.

But of course, being brighter than me, his first concern is sales. If he asked for the spellings to revert to English English, will potential readers be put off? He asks, and I don't know the answer; so I thought I'd ask you on his behalf. Go on over here and give him the benefit of your wisdom, for I have none.

(NB - it's a fantasy novel in a secondary world, sorta Chinese but not; no variety of English would be anybody's mother tongue, if that makes a difference...)

Comments

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

Since this thread is now long and distributed enough to need tangents, I'll throw in the computing equivalent.

Writing software in Britain for a company which only pretended to be American for tax and regulatory purposes I naturally used British spellings (24 bit colour etc.), even though all the customers were American computer making companies. Some of my colleagues backed down and changed to American spellings for DEC and SGI, but I managed to persuade HP that they should take advantage of the Unix Native Language Support feature to supply the American spellings in a separate file, which users could select if needed. I just got the impression that the Americans inventing support for foreign languages didn't originally have their own in mind as a target market.

Maybe it's time for a War of Independence from American imperialism - let's throw all the Diet Coke into Boston (Lincs) harbour! If it has one.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yay you; I thought that software-wise all the English had capitulated long ago. Hell, I did myself learn to type "disk" and "program", tho' I don't think I ever had to go further.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

It's hard to avoid "program" in Pascal, since it's a keyword of the language, though since the inventor is Swiss we're probably lucky to have it in American rather than Romansh.

Sadly my days of fighting for the colours are long over. Since being taken over by a genuinely American company the system changed to me still writing in English, but having a (British or Indian) test department report each example as a "bug". How are the mighty fallen.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

since the inventor is Swiss we're probably lucky to have it in American rather than Romansh

Brrr. I once spent some time with a lovely Swiss German guy, back when I still spoke regular German. He spoke Schweizerdeutsch. We were ... not quite intelligible to each other. He tried to give me lessons, but - eww, the Swiss are weird. Even in the context of the weirdness of other people, the Swiss are weird.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

We are just nine days short of the fortieth anniversary of me taking up employment as a computer programmer. In those days ICT (a British company) wrote 'programme' and IBM (a US company) wrote 'program'. It didn't last. I actually found it useful to be able to distinguish in writing between a set of instructions for a computer, and something on the radio or television. Spelling what I produce 'program' causes me no pain but I still dislike the US spellings of color, plow, etc.

[moshui.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, I had entirely forgotten about "plow" - until I discovered it in my own manuscript yesterday. It was one of my triggers; I can cope with "realize" and even "color" far more easily than this.