Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 22

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January 22

The second o in control

Although the second o in the word control is long, why is the l doubled in the form controlling?? Georgia guy (talk) 02:09, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

In American English because the stress is on that syllable. Jmar67 (talk) 02:30, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

So that it rhymes with "extol(l)ing"? But you've got me interested: Although a single "?" at the end of a sentence suffices to indicate that the sentence is a question, why do you double it? -- Hoary (talk) 02:35, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

The word "extol" also has a long o. Words with long o normally don't double the final consonant before adding -ing. Words with a short o normally do. Georgia guy (talk) 02:37, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Here you are again, trying to make sense out of English. Anyway, here's the etymology of "control"[1] and "extol".[2] Note that both of them come from words with double-l. And also note that it's "extolling". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:46, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

At least in AE, the stress rule takes precedence. Elsewhere such a consonant is generally doubled (e.g., "travelling", AE: "traveling"). Jmar67 (talk) 03:53, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

For me (Southern England, now Northern England), both control and extol have "short" /-ɒl/, not "long" /-əʊl/, so the double l makes perfect sense; though I know that is not true for everybody. --ColinFine (talk) 10:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Georgia guy: I don't know how many times we can explain this to you, so we'll explain it again. English is not consistent. No natural language is consistent, but English is especially noted (especially in its orthography) for being inconsistent. There are some general rules, but every rule has so many exceptions that learning to read and write English is often an exercise in just memorizing specific words and how they are spelled, as any rule you can come up with has so many exceptions. You keep asking questions like "XXXX is a rule in English, so why does YYYY not obey that rule". If you spent any considerable amount of time around English, you quickly begin to learn that there often are not any useful reasons to explain why. I have previously linked you to several videos and articles on this very concept. Please go back, read those, and understand why your repeated questions in this vein rarely lead to simple or satisfying answers. --Jayron32 13:04, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
• Remember, this is a language where the words rough, plough, through, though, cough, and thought do not rhyme, but pony and bologna do. A language where you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway. Where all my belongings were burned up when my house burned down. After which I had to fill out a form by filling it in so that I could turn it in to my insurance company. Quit trying to make sense of it. --Khajidha (talk) 15:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

“Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways? Just to be silly!” –George Carlin   2606:A000:1126:28D:B10C:26A0:A0FF:5576 (talk) 01:16, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

• And, in keeping with this madness, not all of the above applies to all variants of English in the same way. In British English pony and bologna don't rhyme, but parkways are railway stations, and downs are the highest points of some areas of the country. Bazza (talk) 15:47, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Also, a driveway is essentially a short (or possibly long, if you are rich enough) private road leading to a house or garage, so you do drive on it, just not very far. Iapetus (talk) 09:57, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

• The question is rather dispiriting, but some of the ingredients of some of the (non-) responses are too, and none more than the advice to "Quit trying to make sense of" (apparent oddities in?) English. Trying to make sense of apparent paradoxes in English seems an honourable enterprise to me. The problem is of how you go about this, and what your premises and expectations are. Also, I'm puzzled by the way in which a small number of people repeatedly ask questions about English without making it clear that they've digested, or attempted to digest, the relevant parts of relevant books. Duckduckgoing quickly turns up Edward Carney, A Survey of English Spelling; D W Cummings, American English Spelling: An Informal Description; Greg Brooks, Dictionary of the British English Spelling System; and more. -- Hoary (talk) 02:57, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

  Just to note that none of those would answer the OP's question of "why would..." rather than "what is..." which is not the question asked. We can say "what is the spelling of these words" or even "what historical events preceded the current spelling and what list of changes occurred in the spelling of these words", but the OP wanted to know "why" the difference are there, "why" being a question of causality and purpose. That is, "why" wants to know "for what reason did this thing happen". If you have a source to explain that, please share it. I've looked, and can't find anything. --Jayron32 16:55, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

  Jayron32, I was interpreting "why" in a wider sense, one that I think is in fairly common use: the "reason why" such-and-such is that it's an example of a wider phenomenon, such and such. Why do I have ten fingers? Because I'm a human, and humans have ten fingers. (Of course this doesn't start to explain why humans have ten, or indeed why some humans have fewer or more, let alone why some non-humans have ten.) I confess that I haven't looked into any of the books I've named. For certain linguistic(s) areas other than spelling, I have looked in books. (I even possess a shelf-ful.) -- Hoary (talk) 23:06, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The book I'd recommend for the scholarly study of English spelling is Written Language: General Problems and Problems of English Spelling by Josef Vachek. AnonMoos (talk) 23:39, 27 January 2020 (UTC)