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Despite spelling Bs and spell checkers, there is no "correct" or standard spelling (or punctuation) in English (some other languages have government or paragovernment institutions which attempt to regulate and occasionally reform spelling). It is all a matter of "style". English dictionaries merely record common usage that has persisted long enough to be relevant. The nebulous arbiters of style have settled on a balance of maintaining consistency of spelling between word variants, despite differences in pronunciation; maintaining some archaisms (e.g. the aforementioned nigh and cough etc.) or foreign conventions (e.g. the ph of apophthegm) for semantic clarity; and having an otherwise consistent orthography. Different authorities and publishers, particularly of news and textbooks, have their own standards, and some even publish guides (e.g. the AP stylebook, the NY Times or the Chicago Manuals of style), but authors of fiction and poetry are allowed more leeway to be "creative". The guiding principal is generally readability — changes in established spelling can trip people up and can create semantic confusion, making a text more, not less difficult to read for the existing reader base. Chaning the spelling of an unusual foreign word such as apophthegm doesn't present much difficulty to a reader, but change nigh to nie or ny and people have to stop and think "nie? Oh nigh!".

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This doesn't apply to names of course, which have generally been decoupled from their original semantic and linguistic origin. Spelling accordingly varies quite a bit and is altered with every cultural shift. At the same time names may reflect archaic spellings that may have little relation to changes in prosaic language, or be reformed in ways prosaic language is not (as people are more likely to employ names they've only heard and be less concerned with "correct" spelling).

This message was edited 6/18/2018, 5:12 PM