defense vs defence
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@RoiEX said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel The english language is weird ^^
I blame it on the English
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It is. I kinda wonder if the variation over time is more related to when the first dictionaries came out. There was no standard english until not too long ago.
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@Cernel The United States does not have an official language, although some individual states do. No official body decides the spelling of words, but in practice leading newspapers and Microsoft. There is also no official spelling for Canadian English.
As is usual when there is spelling variation, the US spelling is closer to Latin. Giving that defense (or slight variations using an 's') is normal in the US, France, Italy and was the original Latin form, I would suggest standardizing on 'defense'.
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@RogerCooper said in defense vs defence:
@Cernel The United States does not have an official language, although some individual states do. No official body decides the spelling of words, but in practice leading newspapers and Microsoft. There is also no official spelling for Canadian English.
As is usual when there is spelling variation, the US spelling is closer to Latin. Giving that defense (or slight variations using an 's') is normal in the US, France, Italy and was the original Latin form, I would suggest standardizing on 'defense'.
In general, whatever language is used by a state in its constitution and laws is the official language of the country, practically if not formally. It can be more than one, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_StoneI've no idea of what that is, but I just assume it is what you usually get as "American English" in dictionaries, of which I understand "defense" is a word.
I'm not seeing how Latin matters. It is a fact that Latin, as well as Italian, is a language with a lot less phonetic variations than English, and with (at least for Italian, since we don't know how Latin sounded) a much different pronunciation even for most similar sounds, so that the Latin alphabet can only fail at capturing the English language, for the simple fact that it is a tool made for a very different language, thus not apt to the job by a long shot.
A better comparison, in my opinion, is other words that use the "se" and "ce" group of letters. For example:
"ice" is pronounced "ʌɪs".
"advice" is pronounced "ədˈvʌɪs".
"advise" is pronounced "ədˈvʌɪz".
Since "defence" and "defense" are both pronounced as "dɪˈfɛns" or "di-ˈfen(t)s" (not as "dɪˈfɛnz" or "di-ˈfen(t)z"), it looks to me that the British spelling is the most consistent one, unless the Americans actually pronounce "defense" differently from the British "defence", in the same way as "advise" is pronounced differently from "advice" (I don't know, but I understand that the Americans pronounce it exactly like the English "defence", but write it as "defense").
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@Cernel depends what part of the US for pronunciation. My point is the colonials seemed to spell however and that is in part due to the first dictionaries that gave any kind of authoritative spelling only coming out in the 1800s. Before then nobody could say one way was more correct.
With regards to official language, there is none in the US. It is a cultural point as some are trying to make English the official language to effectively racially discriminate. That kind of law would make translators unavailable and officials forms and documents available only in English .
I think we perhaps should draw this discussion back to the game. The consensus is to favor american spelling of words (so color, not colour) for consistency. This really will apply to future work, existing maps are too many to change, coordinating that change across differing engine versions is also a mess. Just changing it would break a lot of maps for a lot of people.
