this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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I will never understand why Americans always seem to have to change the spelling of words.
See this piece of incredibly ubiquitous metal? It's got a name already, but we don't like the name that everyone else calls it by, so we're going to call it by a different name for no reason, but we're not going to do it for any other material, just this one, that makes sense.
Americans didn’t call it aluminum first. British chemist Humphry Davy, the damn guy who isolated and named it, originally named it aluminum in 1812.
He called it aluminum to match the sound of platinum, which was a highly prestigious metal.
Thomas Young suggested aluminium after reading Davys book, because it matched other metals more closely.
Excuse us for spelling irun correctly
American English didn't "change" things to be different from other forms of English, it inhereted words from different spellings in Middle English & Early Modern English (usually based on regional dialects and unique writing styles of different historical writers) just like any other dialect. General American/Canadian/British English all adopted different standards for the spelling, there's no "correct" way.
Just be glad we don't typically use dozens of variations of spellings for most words anymore...