I thought this thread's title was 'Proof Americans and Brits speak a different language'. If we are speaking different language in the Uk from (than for US shipmates) neither usage is more 'correct' than the other. That is the point. We are two lands divided by a common speech. But all Brits know that Americans, like the Irish, are Brits who have somehow gone wrong.
The fascinating thing is, there are numerous cases where it's the Americans that have preserved the earlier form of English and the Brits that have changed.
You arguably can't have "gone wrong" if you're not the ones who have gone anywhere. When Americans have maintained a pronunciation or expression that everyone was using back in the 1700s, the question is why the Brits started doing something different.
I'd have to go hunting to remember good examples (look, I just had wine with dinner), but there are plenty of supposed 'Americanisms' that are not American inventions at all. They're just things that were preserved in America and lost elsewhere.
Surely we all feel, deep within our bones, that the way we do things is RIGHT and that any difference is therefore wrong? I've been enjoying this thread as an exploration of differences, and a reminder that such an assumption isn't correct.
Since @mousethief's comment yesterday I've been wondering if I was the person pissing people off by acting as though British English was the only correct form. It could well have been; it's the sort of "joke" I do make, which can backfire. I am sorry for that, and apologise.
Surely we all feel, deep within our bones, that the way we do things is RIGHT and that any difference is therefore wrong? I've been enjoying this thread as an exploration of differences, and a reminder that such an assumption isn't correct.
Nevertheless, I draw the line at calling the middle course of a 3-course meal the entree. That's just plain illogical. What the hell are you entering?
Isn't gotten an example of preservation of an old form in the US? But there are plenty. Forgotten preserves the -en ending in many English dialects, although, I think "I had forgot it" exists in some dialects..
USA and I think also Canada though I can't recall.
Confused the hell out of me when I went out with friends in California. They ordered entrees and then both they and the waiter were satisfied that was the end of the conversation.
Surely we all feel, deep within our bones, that the way we do things is RIGHT and that any difference is therefore wrong? I've been enjoying this thread as an exploration of differences, and a reminder that such an assumption isn't correct.
Since @mousethief's comment yesterday I've been wondering if I was the person pissing people off by acting as though British English was the only correct form. It could well have been; it's the sort of "joke" I do make, which can backfire. I am sorry for that, and apologise.
Quite a lot of people think that way. I used to teach linguistics, and the introductory stuff on descriptive and prescriptive approaches made some people uncomfortable, since surely their dialect was superior, but quite a lot of people quickly accepted the relativity of one's point of view, and one's dialect. But then Standard English has been the prestige dialect. But some people think their own dialect is inferior, like I don't talk proper.
I recently heard some VERY interesting things about African-American English, in a podcast episode centred around the completely over-inflated controversy about 'Ebonics' teaching a couple of decades back.
Children are effectively having to learn a 2nd form of language when they get to school because the first form that they learned is considered 'wrong' rather than dialect.
I recently heard some VERY interesting things about African-American English, in a podcast episode centred around the completely over-inflated controversy about 'Ebonics' teaching a couple of decades back.
Children are effectively having to learn a 2nd form of language when they get to school because the first form that they learned is considered 'wrong' rather than dialect.
It's not all that surprising. Linguistic snobbery is strong in the UK, and while I couldn't speak for other countries, snobbery is probably universal, plus racism.
Personal note, I went to a posh school, and I was told my Lancashire accent was unacceptable. I still remember the teacher who said it, and his name was Twatshitbastardly.
Since @mousethief's comment yesterday I've been wondering if I was the person pissing people off by acting as though British English was the only correct form. It could well have been; it's the sort of "joke" I do make, which can backfire. I am sorry for that, and apologise.
I feel pretty confident in saying that the person in question was the one saying that the usage that differed from British usage “makes no sense,” not you.
And yes, the main course of a meal is also called the entrée here. The Wiki tells me that: “The stages of the meal underwent several significant changes between the mid-16th and mid-17th century, and notably, the entrée became the second stage of the meal, and potage became the first. At this point, the term "entrée" had lost its literal meaning and had come to refer to a certain type of dish, unrelated to its place in the meal.” It gets even more complicated after that, it seems.
I grew up in deepest, darkest Dorset, the sort of tiny village you have to be a real local ¹ to know where it is, and visited my grandparents there throughout my childhood, moving into their old house as a young teenager. My father's family comes from the West Country. I found it fascinating at the time because a lot of Dorset dialect words are regarded as Americanisms - sidewalk and fall are two that jump to mind immediately - plus the pronunciation of ask as aks and wasp as wopsy (I wondered where I'd learned that one). And some sounded old English - feeling all leery meaning hungry when the German for empty is leer or leere².
Sorry,I am a bit late to this interesting discussion,but I have never heard of 'besuchen mitt' in German. 'mitt' as such does not exist, though one might see something like 'Mittag'(midday) or 'Mitternacht' (midnight).
I visit a friend would be ich besuche einen Freund.
You might say 'Meine Tante besuche ich mit einem Freund' (I visit my aunt with a friend)
I don't want to take this too far but , 'der Besuch' is a noun which means 'the visit' in English,but the word can also be used in German to mean 'visitors' in general.
we have visitors = wir haben Besuch or der Besuch ist da = the visitors are here
'Visite' hoever is thwe expression in German for the doctor's round or a housecall
Sorry,I am a bit late to this interesting discussion,but I have never heard of 'besuchen mitt' in German. 'mitt' as such does not exist, though one might see something like 'Mittag'(midday) or 'Mitternacht' (midnight).
I visit a friend would be ich besuche einen Freund.
You might say 'Meine Tante besuche ich mit einem Freund' (I visit my aunt with a friend)
I don't want to take this too far but , 'der Besuch' is a noun which means 'the visit' in English,but the word can also be used in German to mean 'visitors' in general.
we have visitors = wir haben Besuch or der Besuch ist da = the visitors are here
'Visite' hoever is thwe expression in German for the doctor's round or a housecall
I recently heard some VERY interesting things about African-American English, in a podcast episode centred around the completely over-inflated controversy about 'Ebonics' teaching a couple of decades back.
Children are effectively having to learn a 2nd form of language when they get to school because the first form that they learned is considered 'wrong' rather than dialect.
Let me slightly reorient that.
No doubt there are many who still call it "wrong" but that is not the reason academia-as-a-whole teaches them the standard(er) dialect. We do it because otherwise their career prospects are sharply limited. This too is a bad state of affairs, but schools are largely forced to deal with the world as it is, not the world as it ought to be, and in the US, just as elsewhere, there is a ranking of dialects. Californian/Midwest seems to come out on top, probably due to Hollywood etc. New York and New Jersey are in the middle and speakers from the deep South can face some prejudice regardless of race. And Spanglish, Vinglish, etc. are entirely non-privileged.
Aye, but there's a world of difference between teaching about register and the place of standard and non-standard forms therein, and telling people their dialectual forms are wrong and they should always talk this way instead.
For some reason getting people to understand and accept dialectual variation seems harder than accentual.
I know what it was. Back when Mitt Romney was running for President (dear fond days) the joke was that were he elected, and were he to speak to the German Chancellor, the dialogue would go:
'Mitt Romney'.
Surely we all feel, deep within our bones, that the way we do things is RIGHT and that any difference is therefore wrong? I've been enjoying this thread as an exploration of differences, and a reminder that such an assumption isn't correct.
Nevertheless, I draw the line at calling the middle course of a 3-course meal the entree. That's just plain illogical. What the hell are you entering?
If the French can call the meal they eat in the middle of the day "start-the-day" then I can call the middle course "start-the-meal."
I recently heard some VERY interesting things about African-American English, in a podcast episode centred around the completely over-inflated controversy about 'Ebonics' teaching a couple of decades back.
Children are effectively having to learn a 2nd form of language when they get to school because the first form that they learned is considered 'wrong' rather than dialect.
It's not all that surprising. Linguistic snobbery is strong in the UK, and while I couldn't speak for other countries, snobbery is probably universal, plus racism.
Both of which should be called out when they occur, as I'm sure you'll agree.
Surely we all feel, deep within our bones, that the way we do things is RIGHT and that any difference is therefore wrong? I've been enjoying this thread as an exploration of differences, and a reminder that such an assumption isn't correct.
Nevertheless, I draw the line at calling the middle course of a 3-course meal the entree. That's just plain illogical. What the hell are you entering?
As if language makes sense? Where did you grow up?
Aye, but there's a world of difference between teaching about register and the place of standard and non-standard forms therein, and telling people their dialectual forms are wrong and they should always talk this way instead.
The fascinating thing is, there are numerous cases where it's the Americans that have preserved the earlier form of English and the Brits that have changed.
You arguably can't have "gone wrong" if you're not the ones who have gone anywhere. When Americans have maintained a pronunciation or expression that everyone was using back in the 1700s, the question is why the Brits started doing something different.
I'd have to go hunting to remember good examples (look, I just had wine with dinner), but there are plenty of supposed 'Americanisms' that are not American inventions at all. They're just things that were preserved in America and lost elsewhere.
"Gotten" as participle of "get" is the original form, and the clipped form "got" is a British innovation.
Nick Tamen - we use licence/practice for the noun and license/practise for the verb.
Same in NZ. There are though significant differences between NZ and OZ English, too.
Color/colour, program/programme .... no pattern on following UK or US, either: here in NZ we tend to have cell phone, OZ prefer mobile phones ... and there are of course state differences in OZ (strangely Queensland is similar to NZ in most, except the bewildering "port" for suitcase, satchel, briefcase indistinguishably in the former; in both NZ and QLD we wear togs, take smoko, and a few others) ...
Damn ... I was listening to a Lou Reed song yesterday that had what I suspect was anew Yorkism in it that has never made sense to my non US ears, but have forgotten what it was ...
It's not all that surprising. Linguistic snobbery is strong in the UK, and while I couldn't speak for other countries, snobbery is probably universal, plus racism.
Personal note, I went to a posh school, and I was told my Lancashire accent was unacceptable. I still remember the teacher who said it, and his name was Twatshitbastardly.
Similar experience on a council estate in Luton. I was brought up by Lancastrian parents and was told off at school for saying things like ‘nowt’.
Have I asked about shirtwaists before? I have only come across the term in novels written by Americans set in Victorian/Edwardian England. Having looked the term up I now know they are blouses that look like shirts. Is the term common in the UK, and I've missed it, or is it an Americanism?
When I did Home Economics at school,, long ago, a shirtwaister was a dress of which the bodice part was designed like a shirt: button-through and with a collar. Attached to a skirt of the same material. Very 1950s now I think of it, though I am no that old! (Though my teacher certainly was....)
It’s always spelled practice in the US, whether as a verb or noun.
Unlike prophecy/prophesy.
Oh, the number of times I have heard that mis-pronounced when the Dry Bones reading comes up in churches
Then there's this Eye-zay-uh guy who gets a sigh instead of an aye when some read about him. Are they the same ones who like prophes-sigh?
In U.K. pronunciation Eyes-eye-ah would be fairly standard. Eye-zay-ah is less common. The best way I can represent a likely a Hebrew pronunciation is Iz-ah-yah. (The ‘iah’ part of the name is theophoric - part of the name of God.)
Well, all those who are outraged and accusing me of linguistic snobbery appear to have overlooked my observation that particular phrases in my own native dialect wouldn't make any sense to other English speakers who don't hail from South Wales.
I'm also more than happy to acknowledge that it's often British speech that has changed - dropping 'gotten' and 'got me a' for instance - rather than the other way around. I've acknowledged that in the past and I've also said that there are Americanisms that make a lot more sense than Britishisms, if there is such a word.
Nobody's picked up on that.
Ok, I expressed myself clumsily. 'Visit with Fred' in the way it has been described by Lamb Chopped and others obviously makes sense in some US contexts - and I get the impression that it isn't universal - otherwise people wouldn't use the expression.
Equally, people in South Wales saying, 'Where by is that to?' doesn't make sense to anyone else either. I don't get accused of linguistic snobbery by making that observation.
British people don't use 'gotten' or 'got me a' anymore but those expressions still make sense to us when we hear Americans use them. But 'visit with' involves a semantic shift in order to mean chatting (or 'chopsing' to use another dialect term) - and I was expressing surprise at that - admittedly in a way that could have sounded outraged or provocative.
I thought I'd mitigated things by drawing attention to idiomatic expressions in certain British dialects that are just - if not more - baffling to those who might not be familiar with them.
Shirt-waisters are UK usage - I know what they are too, dresses that look like long blouses, more 1940s than 1950s, fashionable this year and would be available in many shops near you if they were open. I've just faked one by making a matching shirt and buttoned up skirt. The American name is shirt waist.
Clothing is easily confused as nomenclature varies so much: jumpers are pullovers in the UK and pinafores in the US, pants are underwear in the UK and trousers in the US, vests are underwear in the UK and waistcoats in the US, dungarees in the UK are overalls in the US and what the UK call overalls the US calls coveralls (just because we recently had that conversation on Instagram), but they also get called jumpsuits and are horribly fashionable at the moment.
. . . dungarees in the UK are overalls in the US and what the UK call overalls the US calls coveralls (just because we recently had that conversation on Instagram), but they also get called jumpsuits and are horribly fashionable at the moment.
In the US, or at least in my part of it, overalls and coveralls are two similar but different things. And I’ve always heard dungarees as a synonym for jeans.
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I call what you call overalls dungarees in the UK, the implication for us is that overalls are over - all. And your coveralls are overalls here, or jumpsuits, we don't have coveralls. Someone who'd just made dungarees (US overalls) asked us because she got confused by the responses.
Yes, and the other UK name for US coveralls is a boiler suit. So we call those coveralls boiler suits, overalls or jumpsuits. (I wore one the last time they were fashionable and the memories of having to get undressed to use the loo, holding half the garment off insalubrious floors are still vivid. I have no desire to revisit that particular garment.)
Yes, and the other UK name for US coveralls is a boiler suit. So we call those coveralls boiler suits, overalls or jumpsuits. (I wore one the last time they were fashionable and the memories of having to get undressed to use the loo, holding half the garment off insalubrious floors are still vivid. I have no desire to revisit that particular garment.)
This is giving me PTSD about the time when all my folks would wear were matching colored jumpsuits--in their 70s.
Interesting about dungarees. I heard that word a lot as a child in the American South, but rarely hear it anymore. But as I heard it used, it never meant what we call overalls. It meant blue denim pants/trousers, and it’s largely been replaced by “jeans.”
As for coveralls, not all jumpsuits are coveralls. Coveralls are a specific kind of jumpsuit intended to cover your regular cloths to protect them from things like dirt and grease while working. Coveralls are totally utilitarian; if a similar article of clothing is worn because it’s fashionable, it’s something other than coveralls.
The nearest equivalent to your coverall is the overall here, work overalls are put on to protect clothes. We wouldn't usually call the fashion all-in-one trouser garment overalls, the dressmaking patterns are for jumpsuits or boiler suits.
Jeans with a front panel that covers the chest and is held up with straps over the shoulders are called bib overalls in the US south where I came from.
Nick Tamen - we use licence/practice for the noun and license/practise for the verb.
Same in NZ. There are though significant differences between NZ and OZ English, too.
Color/colour, program/programme .... no pattern on following UK or US, either: here in NZ we tend to have cell phone, OZ prefer mobile phones ... and there are of course state differences in OZ (strangely Queensland is similar to NZ in most, except the bewildering "port" for suitcase, satchel, briefcase indistinguishably in the former; in both NZ and QLD we wear togs, take smoko, and a few others) ...
Damn ... I was listening to a Lou Reed song yesterday that had what I suspect was anew Yorkism in it that has never made sense to my non US ears, but have forgotten what it was ...
AFAIK, most people here use colour, but program rather than programme is far more popular. "Port" is interesting; one of my grandmothers used it and she'd never been to Queensland until her 60's. More often than not, a satchel was a small case you wore on your back, with double shoulder straps. When I was but a lad, sometimes we wore togs at the beach, sometimes a costume or of course Speedos as we grew older. Smokos are had rather than taken in my experience. Mobile phone has become plain simple mobile.
Port is short for portmanteau. Back in the days when your school bag was a cardboard suitcase, it made more sense. We still use it for the backpack, though, and the hook you hang it on is the port rack.
Comments
Perhaps we should name the version spoken over the pond Amerenglish? (Over the Irish Sea, of course, they speak Irglish.)
You arguably can't have "gone wrong" if you're not the ones who have gone anywhere. When Americans have maintained a pronunciation or expression that everyone was using back in the 1700s, the question is why the Brits started doing something different.
I'd have to go hunting to remember good examples (look, I just had wine with dinner), but there are plenty of supposed 'Americanisms' that are not American inventions at all. They're just things that were preserved in America and lost elsewhere.
Since @mousethief's comment yesterday I've been wondering if I was the person pissing people off by acting as though British English was the only correct form. It could well have been; it's the sort of "joke" I do make, which can backfire. I am sorry for that, and apologise.
Nevertheless, I draw the line at calling the middle course of a 3-course meal the entree. That's just plain illogical. What the hell are you entering?
USA and I think also Canada though I can't recall.
Confused the hell out of me when I went out with friends in California. They ordered entrees and then both they and the waiter were satisfied that was the end of the conversation.
Quite a lot of people think that way. I used to teach linguistics, and the introductory stuff on descriptive and prescriptive approaches made some people uncomfortable, since surely their dialect was superior, but quite a lot of people quickly accepted the relativity of one's point of view, and one's dialect. But then Standard English has been the prestige dialect. But some people think their own dialect is inferior, like I don't talk proper.
Children are effectively having to learn a 2nd form of language when they get to school because the first form that they learned is considered 'wrong' rather than dialect.
It's not all that surprising. Linguistic snobbery is strong in the UK, and while I couldn't speak for other countries, snobbery is probably universal, plus racism.
Personal note, I went to a posh school, and I was told my Lancashire accent was unacceptable. I still remember the teacher who said it, and his name was Twatshitbastardly.
I feel pretty confident in saying that the person in question was the one saying that the usage that differed from British usage “makes no sense,” not you.
And yes, the main course of a meal is also called the entrée here. The Wiki tells me that: “The stages of the meal underwent several significant changes between the mid-16th and mid-17th century, and notably, the entrée became the second stage of the meal, and potage became the first. At this point, the term "entrée" had lost its literal meaning and had come to refer to a certain type of dish, unrelated to its place in the meal.” It gets even more complicated after that, it seems.
**He shoots he scores.
***So go riboflavin your niacinamide.
There's an article here (link to Dorset Echo) which includes this joy:
¹ population of 120 including outlying farms;
² link to Wikipedia
I visit a friend would be ich besuche einen Freund.
You might say 'Meine Tante besuche ich mit einem Freund' (I visit my aunt with a friend)
I don't want to take this too far but , 'der Besuch' is a noun which means 'the visit' in English,but the word can also be used in German to mean 'visitors' in general.
we have visitors = wir haben Besuch or der Besuch ist da = the visitors are here
'Visite' hoever is thwe expression in German for the doctor's round or a housecall
you're daaaaahm right
Fairly obvious that "mit" was meant, not "mitt".
Let me slightly reorient that.
No doubt there are many who still call it "wrong" but that is not the reason academia-as-a-whole teaches them the standard(er) dialect. We do it because otherwise their career prospects are sharply limited. This too is a bad state of affairs, but schools are largely forced to deal with the world as it is, not the world as it ought to be, and in the US, just as elsewhere, there is a ranking of dialects. Californian/Midwest seems to come out on top, probably due to Hollywood etc. New York and New Jersey are in the middle and speakers from the deep South can face some prejudice regardless of race. And Spanglish, Vinglish, etc. are entirely non-privileged.
For some reason getting people to understand and accept dialectual variation seems harder than accentual.
'Mitt Romney'.
'Ja. Aber wer ist mit Romney?'*
*Yes. But who is with Romney?
If the French can call the meal they eat in the middle of the day "start-the-day" then I can call the middle course "start-the-meal."
Both of which should be called out when they occur, as I'm sure you'll agree.
As if language makes sense? Where did you grow up?
Which was my point.
"Gotten" as participle of "get" is the original form, and the clipped form "got" is a British innovation.
Same in NZ. There are though significant differences between NZ and OZ English, too.
Color/colour, program/programme .... no pattern on following UK or US, either: here in NZ we tend to have cell phone, OZ prefer mobile phones ... and there are of course state differences in OZ (strangely Queensland is similar to NZ in most, except the bewildering "port" for suitcase, satchel, briefcase indistinguishably in the former; in both NZ and QLD we wear togs, take smoko, and a few others) ...
Damn ... I was listening to a Lou Reed song yesterday that had what I suspect was anew Yorkism in it that has never made sense to my non US ears, but have forgotten what it was ...
Oh, the number of times I have heard that mis-pronounced when the Dry Bones reading comes up in churches
Then there's this Eye-zay-uh guy who gets a sigh instead of an aye when some read about him. Are they the same ones who like prophes-sigh?
OED says that's a clipped form of portmanteau, and dates (in print) to 1898.
In U.K. pronunciation Eyes-eye-ah would be fairly standard. Eye-zay-ah is less common. The best way I can represent a likely a Hebrew pronunciation is Iz-ah-yah. (The ‘iah’ part of the name is theophoric - part of the name of God.)
I'm also more than happy to acknowledge that it's often British speech that has changed - dropping 'gotten' and 'got me a' for instance - rather than the other way around. I've acknowledged that in the past and I've also said that there are Americanisms that make a lot more sense than Britishisms, if there is such a word.
Nobody's picked up on that.
Ok, I expressed myself clumsily. 'Visit with Fred' in the way it has been described by Lamb Chopped and others obviously makes sense in some US contexts - and I get the impression that it isn't universal - otherwise people wouldn't use the expression.
Equally, people in South Wales saying, 'Where by is that to?' doesn't make sense to anyone else either. I don't get accused of linguistic snobbery by making that observation.
British people don't use 'gotten' or 'got me a' anymore but those expressions still make sense to us when we hear Americans use them. But 'visit with' involves a semantic shift in order to mean chatting (or 'chopsing' to use another dialect term) - and I was expressing surprise at that - admittedly in a way that could have sounded outraged or provocative.
I thought I'd mitigated things by drawing attention to idiomatic expressions in certain British dialects that are just - if not more - baffling to those who might not be familiar with them.
Clothing is easily confused as nomenclature varies so much: jumpers are pullovers in the UK and pinafores in the US, pants are underwear in the UK and trousers in the US, vests are underwear in the UK and waistcoats in the US, dungarees in the UK are overalls in the US and what the UK call overalls the US calls coveralls (just because we recently had that conversation on Instagram), but they also get called jumpsuits and are horribly fashionable at the moment.
to a UK person, they are dungarees
This is giving me PTSD about the time when all my folks would wear were matching colored jumpsuits--in their 70s.
Interesting about dungarees. I heard that word a lot as a child in the American South, but rarely hear it anymore. But as I heard it used, it never meant what we call overalls. It meant blue denim pants/trousers, and it’s largely been replaced by “jeans.”
As for coveralls, not all jumpsuits are coveralls. Coveralls are a specific kind of jumpsuit intended to cover your regular cloths to protect them from things like dirt and grease while working. Coveralls are totally utilitarian; if a similar article of clothing is worn because it’s fashionable, it’s something other than coveralls.
AFAIK, most people here use colour, but program rather than programme is far more popular. "Port" is interesting; one of my grandmothers used it and she'd never been to Queensland until her 60's. More often than not, a satchel was a small case you wore on your back, with double shoulder straps. When I was but a lad, sometimes we wore togs at the beach, sometimes a costume or of course Speedos as we grew older. Smokos are had rather than taken in my experience. Mobile phone has become plain simple mobile.