Webster opted for jail as the most sensible spelling to adopt and, in time, others have come to see that he had a point. The two versions of the word were spelled all sorts of ways in Middle English, when our language had no letter j: Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window).
I hate to burst your Yankee-bashing bubble, but both spellings originated in the U.K. George R.R. Queensland ..quite big it has been the influence of american t.v as to why jail has become more predominant. Of course words spoken aloud can be transcribed, as in court testimony. Even in British academia, you would be seen as old-fashioned and out of date for using the old spelling gaol. 'Jail' is neither an entirely new spelling, nor a wholly American one. Due to poor education many words were commonly misspelled centuries back. A state has a Premier .
Victoria.. not that big In this article, I will compare jail vs. gaol. Etymologically, a jail is a little cage, John Ayto says in his Dictionary of Word Origins. Even Oz has a few colloquialisms such as Fair Dinkum which I tolerate but I havent heard Cobber for many years even though some US films (with those bloody awful Orstralian accents they think we have) still use it, Paul Hogan isnt the epitome of most of us but we know Gomer Pyle is what to expect in every town we visit in the US outside New York (are there any other cities?). I have to say that I feel very archaic. Glamor or Glamour Whats the Difference? Brenda. Its most common use today is in the names of jails, but it is still possible to find a few scattered instances ofgaolas a common noun in recent writing. Eventually gaol will be a spelling of the past. As for slavery, they were the best in the world at it. A: Both spellings have been around for hundreds of years. According to the Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, there was much rejoicingthough, oddly, the West Australian was somewhat laggard. Wellbeing or Well-Being Which is Correct? Really dont see how thats comparable to the US practicing slavery for hundreds of years and nuking civilians in a foreign country. They were committed to work as a part of their penalty (for usually very minor crimes I will admit) and once they had completed their sentence they were in many cases granted lands to supply produce to reduce the reliance on the crown store. America for the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki The spelling gaol being reserved only for gaols which have that spelling in their names due to their age.
Even when we dont pronounce the vowel, its true: ice, for instance. I agree that in gaol, the sound is definitely a leading j as opposed to a trailing j as per these examples, but theres a long list of j-like pronounciations for G in english. Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia out now! It rears its head in and in Australian legal literature as far back as 1799, and in British Hansard records as far back as 1805. Being protected they are not allowed to be hunted any longer but we have found some in haggis traps that we have out to try to get rid of those bothersome beasts that the early kilted settlers introduced. This leaves Berrima Gaol and Parramatta Gaol out on a limb. And then there's the oddness of the initial G sound. Arrogant Aussie, more like. I have long been an opponent of simplified spelling and the simplified minds who are in favour of destroying the Queens English. I dont dislike those from the USA , anymore than those people from anywhere else, and having been at sea for over 25 years have visited many countries, and all have traits that are different from those in Australia. And of course you hate Americans. I dont envy that family at all; really hope the guy who got hit recovers and the brother doesnt get a custodial sentence but a suspended one with a deportation order immediately after in the interests of justice.
This list could go on into the thousands easily. The communist regime of russia was arguably worse than slavery from the death toll alone. It was eclipsed by jail, which is the same word spelled a different way. I didnt say learn German I said opponent of simplified spelling which is not the same as devolving to Saxon (old English) and desiring to live in the middle ages. The Romans did this as well but would also have runaway slaves thrown into the arena to fight gladiators and wild animals to entertain the masses. More later.. Welcome to and Acknowledgement of Country. Apparently your understanding of history begins in the 1940s. Ah, the idiosyncrasies of American English. You still get a pitcher of beer, we now use jug. Which is the most famous nation for having slaves and discrimination and still do discriminate?????? Here is a helpful trick to remember gaol vs. jail. As opposed to what? g followed by a, o and u is a g; followed by e or i, its j; Owners of Country throughout Australia, and the Bugger, I could go on but Im busy, keep going Dentuso, we are enjoying your verbosity. I am an Aussie and I write the place of legal incarceration as gaol.
In Internet Explorer versions up to 8, things inside the A jail in Galway, maybe possible. Macquarie Dictionary & Thesaurus online. to post a comment. But even there, there's change afoot: as Susan Butler writes, state governments now run 'correctional facilities', leaving 'gaol' largely to consigned to history. Erwhich tend, as a very, very strongly-abided-by rule, to be followed by an e or an i. Ron I went to school in Birmingham, England and if we had spelt gaol as jail, we would have had a rap over the knuckles with a ruler. Perhaps there's good reason that the Australian affinity for gaol lingered longer than it did even in Britain: the spelling 'gaol' has, in the words of the Macquarie Dictionary, been 'fossilised in names'. It is my understanding that over the years in the US the spelling Jail became the favoured spelling. There is a real history? I was stationed in the UK for 3 years and found that I was increasingly irritated with what my country had done with the language. Macquarie Dictionary today! "More Than Words: The Making of the Macquarie Dictionary", 3500+ new words in the 'Macquarie Dictionary Eighth Edition', Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: Second Edition. Embi could whup ya (token Yankism!!) | gaol is the original UK spelling hence why Australians still use this. It should also be noted that English convicts played an important part in the settlement of the USA. 
From the Herald, Glasgow, Scotland, in an article Travel: Alcatraz, dated 23 March 2013. 3rd ed.) Also, at no point in Evil Englischers comment did he wonder why people hated the English. Majority of Aussies will spell it Wimmen anyway and while we are on the subject of Americans and their love of removing letters from British spelt words, Australia has 3 As not 2. I had an argument with my daughters teacher 20 years ago when she was marked wrong for spelling colour our way. Not a member? They ultimately are the same word Old Northern French used the form gayol and Parisian French the form jaile. The elder Mr. Lee was convicted of bribery and tax evasion twice but never spent a day in jail. Enter your email address to subscribe to the blog by email. The next chart is the same way, but it shows that jail has been more common in American English except for a brief period in the early 19th century. with a blindfold on, wearing budgie smugglers and a giggle hat. However, the dictionary adds that this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail., Check out our books about the English language.
A Territory has a Chief Minister. I will use each term in an example sentence, and I will also show you how to use a mnemonic to decide whether you should choose jail or gaol for your own writing.
If you were writing for an American audience in 1815, or a British audience before 1935, you could get away with using gaol. I remember seeing somewhere (in England, I think) seeing a stone arch at a prison on which the mason had inscribed the word 'Goal'. In fact, American spelling in particular was profoundly influenced by Noah Webster (of dictionary fame) who is the person responsible for altering the common 18th centruty British spellings of gaol, publick, masque, mould, colour, etc., into the more consistent jail, public, mask, mold, color. Please sign in We get this directly from French, but Spanish and Italian also do this (my understanding of Portuguese is more limited)though in Castilian Spanish, ce and ci are pronounced the and thi; in Italian theyre che and chi. I gotta get cleaned up and chase skirt. Be accurate, yes? Portuguese follows exactly that rule for g and c: For more hundreds of kilometres I can remember the desert meets the sea with the desert spinifex existing within just a metre from mangroves .The fishing is pretty is amazing. In 1978, the Government Publishing Style Manual made 'jail' a permissible alternative for Australian copyeditors for the first time. no, I said Im not a huge fan. The jail spelling predates the United States by several hundred years and was favored in British English before briefly giving way to gaol through a portion of the 19th century. Of course the gaol spelling gives rise to the inevitable confusion between gaol and goal. Perfect weather for a gaol break! says the bellhop at my San Francisco hotel, squinting at the fog. That is much closer to many other languages but in particular, Japanese who have just as much trouble with such places as Edinburgh, pronounced Edin bora or Worcestershire pronounced Wuss-tar-shar. The spelling jail is the most common spelling now in Australian English. Mysterious to us. In the early 1990s, learning British English (as a second language) in school (2nd grade onwards), the teacher favored gaol vs jail. The two versions of the word were spelled all sorts of ways in Middle English, when our language had no letter j: gayhol, gayhole, gayll, gaylle, gaille, gayole, and so on. And if Im right, then youre just a xenophobic prat who is trying to rationalise his hatred towards the English. Because Middle English (the language spoken from about 1100 to 1500) adopted two distinct versions of the word from French. Generally, the Romance languages, and those parts that English inherited from Latin through French, follow this rule: e or i makes the preceding consonant different if it has two readings. 7. US is so proud on their history and yet forget this???? Yet the US took British convicts over nearly 400 years. The barman asked where I was from and I told him Australia. Very interesting information. But all US cartoons (when Cartoon Network had proper cartoons) I used to watch back in the day used jail. - May 3, 2016, 6:19 p.m. If you break the law, you will be sent to jail, Andrea reminded her boyfriend. Some British publications still use gaol, especially when referring to the proper names of a specific jail. Illiterate Americans as usual have taken another word which posed a challenge for their droll moronic tones and rearranged it to suit them. I expect one could find current examples in the Glasgow Herald, etc. Youse bastardsd bore a wombat out of its burrow or a kookaburra out of a gum tree, so go and get a woolly dingo pup fair upya! The traditional spelling has been gaol in Britain and jail in the United States. Western Australia.. very bloody big ..properly big, Australian Capital Territory. |
much like mum and mom both are correct but Australia recognizes UK dialect. Mysterious to us, perhaps because the English were still trading in slaves, subjugating nations and sending prisoners to other lands during this period. 'Gaol' is certainly the elder statesmen of the two variationsit appears in English some centuries before 'jail'. This could result in spelling changes, usage changes, or replacement with an entirely new word. }rF~N%oE/jQluHggb@,P xLGc}}7'; P$-m2O_)lS~:E(5-''4/iu[^-*BYQ`*|*Zq"T6,wi2;wc-I?g_Rghetr~LFo?4AWxoVdZS,gWN6UV?4|`+\2Ocq7K|9j0{Ex_=>8AblVq.>&LSaL"-,>kl61Y?8298J({{G ,r/IYU&]czt0z9IWI6D5(x:S/jjnrFS.p{^pry(7|s7J|G}Q|G^nm+npW.qoV7+ZwEbML V|fBP8F]*6jEo4Kh_E@1:lEv= eq+J|c-6-+C>8|/0tLf=43FZ"^0.DeBTY1%Vqdgz.31v\Z3*L_pe. Nowadays, however, jail is the accepted form in both of these language communities. But interesting enough, in Portuguese a large cage is a jaula, which has a pronounciation close to jail. But as a sequence of letters, it makes very little sense. Bay the way, both gaiola anda jaula have the same Latin origin: caveola, a diminutive of cavea. Until the 17th century, Ayto writes, gaol was pronounced with a hard /g/ sound, but then it gradually fell into line with jail.. For those not committed to google ( that is cheating ), The States are This is a frequent occurrence for all modern languages, English included. Want some help with other common confusables? I would have thought Galway Gaol would be a proper noun so it is highly unlikely they would change the spelling of it to Jail. The use of the word slave is incorrect, the convicts were not owned by anyone. Since gaol has an O in it, like the words old and outdated, you can use the words spelling as a reminder that it is no longer current. But, thanks to combination of British and American colonialism, telegraphy and mass literacy, English spelling is now relatively standardised. Other than the spelling, there is no difference between the words. Macmillan Publishers Australia 2022. This all said I am NOT talking about the single punch that got such widespread coverage. explains, gaol, gaoler, the traditional spellings in the UK, are now under severe and probably unstoppable pressure from jail, jailer, which are dominant in most other parts of the English-speaking world.. I would completely agree with you if the majority of the English population believed these actions were right but this is clearly not the case. People have been arguing about which word to use since at least 1668. Italy for Fascism Do you forget the Civil War. we would be spaeking Dutch if the VOC had bothered to sail down the east coast. The gaol version comes from the Norman French gaiole or gaole, the OED says,while jail comes from the Old Parisian French jaiole or jaile. Gadigal people of the Eora nation as the Traditional Gaol is not the original UK English word, as the word in both its g- and j- forms come into Middle English (predating the United Kingdom by centuries) from Norman and Parisian French respectively. Not sure about now. twjx.)8M/$5~VdMFyzhm0W#){Spn)UX?=8X^fR^/&I]oYT)*d ^/p!n They then killed many Mexicans to form New Mexico. You should not be irritated Gareth, we English have strayed well away from many words that we used when settling in to North America. Do you hate all these people? The difference has nothing to do with British or American English. Since gaol is the older form, and the words old and outdated both begin with that letter, you should have little trouble remembering that gaol is the older, outdated variant of this word. Both forms existed in English but the form gaol was the one that had been taken on by British law. Indeed the spelling in British English is now jail with gaol as a lowly placed variant.
After all, they to were colonial powers. The short answer, according to Oxford Dictionaries online, is that the word gaol was originally pronounced with a hard g, as in goat. Heres a fuller answer. South Australia ..quite big Aussie who loves the Brits but hates the Yanks.
As time goes on this pervades as acceptable.
Even though this chart provides a clear illustration of a long-term trend, it is not scientific. Macquarie Dictionary acknowledges the Traditional During a coffee break at work, the clue prison suggested jail for these four spaces: _A_L. This sparked a debate with a British friend over gaol vs. jail. Your thoughts? The citys proposal to build a new jail near a wealthy suburb was met with fierce resistance. Ignorant vs. Stupid Whats the Difference? Australia only has 6 States. There is a region known as The South West Land Division . Even the UK Spectator, hardly a bastion of liberal groupthink, has queried why English ever spelt jail thus.
Enjoy all the great features by subscribing today. Grammar, etymology, usage, and more, brought to you by Patricia T. OConner and Stewart Kellerman, Although gaol is still acceptable in Britain, its now considered a variant spelling of jail on both sides of the Atlantic, according to the, The short answer, according to Oxford Dictionaries online, is that the word gaol was originally pronounced with a hard, Ayto explains that the English word is ultimately derived from, The gaol version comes from the Norman French.