The Adventure Of English - Episode 5 English in America - BBC Documentary

Upon landing in North America, settlers encountered Squanto, a native man who had been captured and brought to England to learn English and become a guide. After escaping, Squanto returned to his tribe, which happened to live near the place that the English settlers had created their small village. Among shockingly few other words, the settlers adopted "skunk" and "squash" into their vocabulary from the local language, making clear that they meant to impose their own culture, rather than adopt any other. English began to change, not only in meaning, with "shops" becoming "stores," but also with the variety of accents becoming considerably less in number than in England. In the last 18th and early 19th centuries, Noah Webster wrote what was known as the American Spelling Book, or the Blue Backed Speller, which would become one of the most influential books in the history of the English language, Webster&Dictionary. This dictionary created simpler spellings, eliminating the "u" in words like "colour" and "honour," reducing "axe" to "ax" and reducing double letters to single ones, like in the word "traveller," now spelt "traveler" in the United States. Words with "re" endings became "er," and other spellings changed include "defence," which became "defense." Interestingly, some words that England had dropped were kept in by Americans, such as "deft," "scant," "talented," "likely" and "fall" instead of the newer "autumn." Two-thousand words were created in journals of the...