Some corrections

4 Nov 2025

1. In my article on English spelling reform, I suggested that the different in spelling between -ent and -ant (and likewise between -ence and -ance) is unnecessary, because these suffixes are pronounced the same and mean the same thing (when they mean anything at all). However, while the endings of “deference” and “substance” are pronounced the same, the distinction between the ‘e’ and ‘a’ becomes important in the related words “deferential” and “substantial”. (And these are of course not the only examples.) So it would not be wise to respell “deference” to “deferance” (as I would have suggested) or “substance” to “substence”.

2. In my article on American English phonology, I said that certain vowels, including /æ/, cannot occur at the end of a syllable. However, I have since thought of a counterexample, namely the word “plateau” /plæto/. The /t/ in this word certainly belongs to the second syllable (because it is aspirated rather than tapped), which implies that the first syllable ends in /æ/. However, it remains true that /æ/ cannot occur at the end of a word.

   (I have thought a lot recently about syllable boundaries and how they interact with aspiration. I might write about this in the future.)

3. At the end of my most recent article, titled Groups with negatives, I conjectured that a “group with \(n\)th roots of unity”, defined as a group equipped with a central element \(\xi\) satisfying \(\xi^n = 1\), could also be characterized as a group object in the category of \(\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}\)-sets. Not much thought went into this conjecture, and it is false. (It is true when \(n=2\), but that is a special case.) The reason is that multiplication by \(\xi\) need not commute with the group inverse: \((\xi x)^{-1}\) is equal to \(\xi^{-1}x^{-1}\), not \(\xi x^{-1}\). I plan on writing an article about this soon.