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From: sullivan@harvard.ARPA (John Sullivan)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: British, American spelling of past tenses
Message-ID: <1@harvard.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 10-Aug-84 00:03:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: harvard.1
Posted: Fri Aug 10 00:03:33 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Aug-84 19:21:19 EDT
Organization: Aiken Computation Lab, Harvard
Lines: 10

The rule I learned, which seems to apply almost all the time, is that the
final consonant in a verb is doubled when forming the past tense only if
that final syllable is accented.  Thus "canceled" has just one 'l' (although
I must admit it looks strange to me, and recently when I used it I had to
look it up to assure myself it wasn't an exception), while a word like
"rebelled" gets a second 'l'.  I don't know of any exceptions to the rule
off hand.

		John M. Sullivan
		sullivan@harvard.{uucp,arpa}