[snip]
I make no claim to be an expert in old or mediaeval English. I mentioned the difference between "colour" and "color" (or I could have chosen "medieval" and "mediaeval") simply as an example of how in the very latest modern English words can be spelled differently while being pronounced almost exactly the same. You then made statements about the history of these different spellings, which I questioned because the contradicted the sources I had to hand, as a non-expert - which, as you pointed out, are not the most scholarly sources. Unless these sources, including Shakespeare texts from the "non dot edu website" of the University of Victoria in Canada, are entirely incorrect and misleading, your statement that the "u" in "colour" was added by "a school of 19th-century grammarians" is factually incorrect.
I pointed out this error. You replied "Condensation of material for a post to a list is not an error." And I agreed that what I had written was also an oversimplification of a complex picture.
... it is wise to condense and to simplify. If someone is interested, one can always expand upon a particular point..It does not take a genius to scrounge around websites for an exception to a condensed and simplified statement. It does take hostility and a marked unwillingness to learn by asking questions or for further data..
I attempted to learn by looking for websites with appropriate information. I am sorry that I transgressed by looking at universities other than US ones, and so having "non dot edu websites" and also perhaps not taking the standard US line on relative merits of US and other spellings of English.
I am very aware that I cannot trust everything I read on the Internet. But I found enough to demonstrate that what you had claimed, that the spellings "colour" and "honour" were a 19th century innovation, was very far from the whole story -
because Shakespeare's first edition printers and Samuel Johnson had used them. (I don't care what was written in a manuscript by the relatively uneducated Shakespeare, who couldn't even spell his own name consistently;
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