Still a beginner who doesn't know how to make a group.

[Klaus]

Sorry for the little pun
It is spelled -> godsend (lowercase S)

[SparkOut]

Spelt

Don't go all American on us Klaus!

[Klaus]

Craig is american, so I think this is legitimate!

[jacque]

"American". Capital A.

[dunbarx]

Hmmm.

I was mischievously following the LC convention of combining compound words, even when invoking the deity. That seems to have fallen flat.

Craig

[Klaus]

"American". Capital A.

Sheeeesh...

[richmond62]

Presumably a 'godSend' was sent by a lesser god, a demigod, or a godling.

While a 'Godsend' would originate with the big Kahuna.

And, bye-the-bye, both 'spelled' and 'spelt' are acceptable spellings in British English.

I was once told by someone from Peru that he was an American, and he was correct. Citizens of the USA really have no adequate national adjective.

[SparkOut]

"American". Capital A.

Yep. That's correct.
Spelled and spelt are both acceptable, to a point. I am not unhappy there are differences between American versions onf English and English, but "spelled" for everything is more upsetting to me than leaving out the letter U in so many words.

[richmond62]

Most words such as 'color', labor', and so on came into English from Latin, and spelt like that, but ignorant people such as that coarse chiel "Dr" Johnson (who went round Scotland being rude to people) shoved a superfluous 'u' in there because he thought they came into English through French.

Nathaniel Webster has commented on this quite extensively in his Dictionary (I picked up a facsimile of his original version when I was in Philadelphia about 3 years back).

[jacque]

We've hijacked the original topic by now, but...what's with that crazy "aluminium" thing?

[richmond62]

SodIUM
PotassIUM
CaesIUM
RadIUM
ChromIUM

and so on ad nauseam . . . so AluminIUM . . .

And while I'm here, let's spout some rude words just for good measure

Aesthetic

Foetus

Renaissance

TraveLLer

Sulphur

Caesium

[stam]

Many of the the spelling peculiarities, like aesthetic, paediatric, astronaut etc are not due to Latin but rather Greek derivation.

That is because diphthongs, a sound created by two letters, are commonplace in the Greek language. Other diphthongs are pronounced differently in Greek but the spelling is maintained even though it makes no real sense - eg astronaut, from the Greek: αστροναυτης (pronounced astronaftis), where astro = star and naut (ναυτης pronounced 'naftis') = sailor.

The diphthong "αυ" can be pronounced either "av" or "af" depending on the word, because Greek is vastly older, irregular and more complicated than either British or American English and that's even after great simplifications even from the 1980s onwards (don't get me started on 4 different accents on vowels I had to learn as kid, that followed no rules and had to be learned on a per-word basis, thankfully a thing of the past now)

British English coopted both Latin and Greek spellings but many of these spellings were simplified in American English. Another example is oesophagus in British English, spelled esophagus in American but pronounced pretty much the same as the vastly older greek οισοφαγος (where the diphthong 'oi' has been changed to 'oe' in the English version and then just 'e' in American).

What is weirder is that the brits then applied the Greek logic to non-greek words, for example foetus - they used the same diphthong as oesophagus, but this word doesn't exist in greek. I guess they just wanted to appear high-brow

For Greeks this is a source of amusement, as we can see the spelling derivations quite clearly
Of course for non-greeks, it's all Greek to them...

[richmond62]

Yes, well, modern Greeks also get things wrong such as claiming that β was pronounced /v/ 2,500 years ago, and that δ was pronounced /∂/, when linguistics have established unequivocally that, at that time they were pronounced /b/ and /d/ respectively.

[stam]

How on earth can “modern linguistics” prove either way how things were pronounced > 3000 years ago? Was there a voice recoding the entire Greek civilisation missed somewhere?

And to state this “unequivocally” is beyond arrogant. I’m going to guess that these “linguists” are not Greek.

There is absolute zero basis for comparison other than “well that’s what we do now so those silly Greeks that have been speaking more or less the same language for thousands of years must be wrong”.

At best this statement seems like something derived from a magic mushroom-fuelled fever dream…

Oh and by “modern Greek” I presume you include Byzantine era, more that 1500 years ago, where not only was Greek spoken but pronunciation is preserved in Christian music sheets that use specific notation for correct pronunciation and pitch for church choirs?

[richmond62]

Phonetic reconstruction is done by studying prosody and rhyme.

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agp/

"Ancient Greek sounded quite different from modern Greek. There were three types of stops, voiceless aspirated (ph, th, kh), voiceless unaspirated (p, t, k), and voiced (b, d, g). Basically the only fricative was s, which in some environments, next to voiced stops, was pronounced z. The voiceless aspirated and the voiced stops changed into fricatives by around the fourth century of our era. Except that the voiced stops remained stops after nasals."

https://www.quora.com/What-did-ancient-Greek-sound-like

Oh, and not forgetting that 'Hubris' is both a Greek word and a characteristic.