Independent not independant

[MollieO]

My first posting in pedants' corner and I wonder whether it should be my first posting in AIBU instead. I just don't understand postings referring to or asking about 'independant' schools. There seems to be loads of this atm.

Yup.

C'est vrai.

It means that parents want better education for their children than they had themselves.

a true pedant.

I wonder if it is down to the use of dependent / dependant (person), and thus confusion is the result
I cannot claim to know, sorry!

I'm usually willing to let grammatical errors go but this just annoys me. It isn't even as though the alternative spelling can ever be correct

Can someone give me a pointer for this? Is there a rule for when a word is spelled -ent and when it is -ant?
Why is it errant / fragrant / assistant but different / provident / president?

There are also many threads with comments from aspirational posters who want their DCs to go to "grammer" school.

Don't get me started on 'grammer'! Like DrTrillian says I assume that the parents are hoping for a better education for their dcs. I just hope their dcs don't need help with their English homework

God, yes. That one really irritates me too. If you want your kids to go to fucking private school, learn to fucking spell.

Senua, I suspect there isn't an obvious rule. Lots of these words are Latin loan words in origin, so the ending will derive from the original Latin word - e.g. (I'm guessing) errant from errare. Assistant is prob borrowed from French but again Latin in origin. President - one who presides, hence, ent, blah blah. Gah - I'm going to have to look these up.

with a theory along the same idea as yours, habbibu, and this being where my Latin ran out...
i went to the good old wiki looking at gender in gramatical constructions. I have to say that I am none the wiser, as the main 'answer' to our question is this :

? -ent and -ant in English are allomorphs of one morpheme meaning "X does V", where V is the V affixed to; which of the two forms appears when affixed to a given verb depends on a diacritic on the verb, a diacritic which specifies what conjugation class the Latin etymon belonged to. ?

Sean M. Burke, 'English -ent and -ant', 25 March 1996.

Well I am sorry to be dim, but I look like because that doesn't make any sense at all to me

take a look here if reading the rest of it would be of any help. Obviously it wasn't in my case

Well, the jargon is a bit heavy! He's basically saying they're two variants of the same grammatical suffix, and have similar/same semantic meanings - so the president is one who presides, and the assistant is one who assists - those last are the "V" he's talking about.

And the spelling, as we suspected, depends on the original Latin conjugation - it's not gender-based, as we're talking verbs, not nouns. So to find the answer, you'd really have to know if there was a rule behind the distinction of the original Latin verb spellings. And there I'm truly lost!

habbibu
well I don't know that one either but I know my old Classics lecturer will
If I am sufficiently eaten up by curiosity I might feel the need to email her!

Please do, gigglewitch.
Fascinating so far (well, the bits that I have understood!).