@Contrarian said:
No, it is about the way it is pronounced and changing the spelling to accommodate that. Phonetics doesn't work and should never be used in English. The phonetic Americans use is the "er". Theatre pronounced by some Americans is "thee-ay-ter", not "thee-uh-ter". I barely know were to begin with your post.
The schwa sound, or "uh" is the non emphasised vowel, in the case of theatre, the last e and it eliminates the sound of the r. We, non-Americans, learn and understand the rules of proper English and apply them with little difficulty. Now, I don't care that Americans spell it 'wrong' or that they emphasise the "er", as long as I don't see it outside of the US. I am merely pointing out that you say it is phonetically correct to spell it theater, when phonetics is based entirely on accent. As accents vary widely across the English speaking world, you can't say the American way of spelling it is 'more' correct. The only true and correct way to say it and spell it is as it was by the English. Everything that varies from that is simply accepted pronounciation and spelling outside of the UK.
The person we have to blame in all of this is Noah Webster. Noah didn't like many of the rules of proper English. He took out the "u" in colour, replaced the 'c' with an 's' in defence, took out the 'ue' in dialogue, dropped the extra 'l' in traveller and replaced the 's' with 'z' in criticise. He even tried to drop the 'ue' on tongue - tung! The point of this fact is that Americans intentionally changed spelling because they thought that their children would learn better if they simplified it, by changing the rules. How would we be if Australia, New Zealand and Canada made up their own rules as well?
Clearly you are a prescriptivist, and all I have to say about that is that you are fighting a pointless and losing battle. Also there is no point in lecturing me on the rules of "proper" english because I have learned the same rules you have, and I only said that the use of "re" doesn't make any sense phonetically. Phonetics may not be perfect, because yes there will always be that grey area because of accents, but they're the best method we've got right now. There is no reason to disregard them, regardless of your opinion on how well it works, because our language is such an idiotic amalgamation that nearly every rule of spelling has a proper and allowable violation somewhere. When you can never be sure for any particular word whether a rule is to be obeyed or accepted through any means other than memorization than our rules are broken, and phonetic spelling is the only way to compensate for that. It's because of stupid rules like those that everyone finds it so difficult to learn English. Your argument against it because of accent's is somewhat valid, however it does not even apply to this case because we are essentially talking about different words in two (slightly) different languages.
You criticize Webster for simplifying and changing the language, and yet that's the way language has always gone, it cannot be a standard thing no matter how hard they try to make it that way. English is ever changing and always evolving, and American-English is not the only version with its idiosyncrasy's, nor is it any less valid than any other simply because it is version 4127 of random-germanic-tribe dialect instead of version 4126. If language were not allowed to change then this entire post would be a drawing of two antelopes sitting down staring at each other indignantly. I'm not arguing that it is more valid either, simply saying that over here Theater is a more logical way of spelling it than Theatre based on the pronunciation, and that over there neither spelling is very good because phonetically they don't line up whatsoever and they should strive to for the reasons I stated earlier.
Also it is almost always pronounced "thee-uh-ter" over here and "thee-ay-ter" is never used (again, over here) except for the sake of embellishment or if someone is trying to sound classical or cultured (as I said before). I dont know why you thought you knew better about that than someone who actually lives in America instead of Australia.
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