Page:The American Language.djvu/280

264 it has already migrated to England. Meanwhile, one often encounters, in American advertising matter, such experimental forms as burlesk, foto, fonograph, kandy, kar, holsum, kumfort and Q-room, not to mention sulfur. Segar has been more or less in use for half a century, and at one time it threatened to displace cigar. At least one American professor of English predicts that such forms will eventually prevail. Even fosfate and fotograph, he says, "are bound to be the spellings of the future." §6 Minor Differences—Various minor differences remain to be no- ticed. One is a divergence in orthography due to differences in pronunciation. Specialty, aluminum and alarm offer examples. In English they are speciality, aluminium and alarum, though alarm is also an alternative form. Specialty, in America, is al- ways accented on the first syllable ; speciality, in England, on the third. The result is two distinct words, though their meaning is identical. How aluminium, in America, lost its fourth sylla- ble I have been unable to determine, but all American authori- ties now make it aluminum and all English authorities stick to aluminium.

Another difference in usage is revealed in the spelling and pluralization of foreign words. . Such words, when they appear in an English publication, even a newspaper, almost invariably bear the correct accents, but in the United States it is almost as invariably the rule to omit these accents, save in publications of considerable pretensions. This is notably the case with cafe crepe, debut, debutante, portiere, levee, eclat, fete, regime, role, soiree, protege, elite, melee, tete-a-tete and repertoire. It is rare to encounter any of them with its proper accents in an American newspaper; it is rare to encounter them unaccented in an Eng-