The world calls it Football. America calls it Soccer. Unfortunately because their version of football is a totally different sport..."Americanized Rugby" sorta. What I don't get is who came up with the name for it....why Football? You're mostly running with the ball in your hands. I have nothing against it, it's just always been one of those mysteries.
To me it's like the americans are trying to get away from the old yoke of England.
Relettering the language, renaming sports, driving on the oposite side of the road as the English... And much much more to "get away" from old England.
And yet, the americans refuse to modernize their measurements to what most of the modern world uses, and instead they guard their ancient non logical measurement system like it was the holy grail. Despite that it's a system they got from the English.
As for me? I use both... Like americans, I remove the u's when I feel lazy. When I'm feeling good, and remember my studies(I could have been a english teacher with my long forgotten education), I go back to the good old correct english.
Been in a bit of a lazy spell lately, like last 10 years, and now my written english is like my written norwegian... Dialect/Accented.
I'm not a big fan of the extra vowels, but I prefer the British spelling of some words, especially in cases of doubling the final consonant before adding a suffix. Travelling, not traveling (my American spell-checker complains about that all the time). And some typically crass words actually look a bit classy in their original forms. Diarrhoea and paedophile.
How do americans spell Diarrhoea then? And why am I so interested?
I live in the U.S..Florida to boot.. and I can say with confidence to just give it time...before you know there won't be need of debate. Unless you want to argue "Colour" vs. 'Colore"
It's simple, it's colour, and armour. These spellings were firmly in place and the correct spelling way before America became independent, they changed them to simply be anti colonel, same reason they drive on the right side of the road, a protest to be anti colonel. Color and Armor are simply the incorrect spelling the USA as a culture and a country took upon themselves to spell wrong and continue to teach new generations of their citizens to spell it wrong to keep up the anti colonel protest of their forefathers, the correct spelling will always be colour and armour, USA didn't create the English language.
I'm English, I've lived in England all my life. In school and university I used English spelling, because anything else caused problems with the teaching staff.
In my writing outside of academia, though, I use a mix of American and English spellings.
I grew up reading American comics. Most of my favorite writers are American. I studied American literature for a while at college and for the last decade I've been playing mainly American MMOs and posting on U.S. based forums.
I see it as a purely aesthetic choice, not a nationalistic one. I'd never spell "cheque" as "check" because it doesn't look as attractive on the page, even though it sounds identical when spoken. On the other hand, I think most "ou" words look cleaner and sharper on the page without the "u", so I choose to use the American spellings.
The British should feel lucky that its even called English still, they could be speaking German had things been different.
Just clarify - The Battle of Britain was between 10 July - 31 October 1940 and when December 7, 1941 at about 7:55 AM when Pearl Harbour was attacked.
Whereas the overall argument America involvement made it possible to win WW2 in years.. rather then decades, Britain hadn't fallen (as had eveyone else) but as Winston Churchill was quoted;
"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
Speech in the House of Commons (1940-06-18)"
Anyways... Armour, Colour, Flavour etc
"Obi-Wan Kenobi: We were decieved by a lie; we all were. It appears that SOE is behind everything, including the NGE! After the death of CU, the NGE became their new apprentice."
It's simple, it's colour, and armour. These spellings were firmly in place and the correct spelling way before America became independent, they changed them to simply be anti colonel, same reason they drive on the right side of the road, a protest to be anti colonel. Color and Armor are simply the incorrect spelling the USA as a culture and a country took upon themselves to spell wrong and continue to teach new generations of their citizens to spell it wrong to keep up the anti colonel protest of their forefathers, the correct spelling will always be colour and armour, USA didn't create the English language.
Yes, the USA didn't create the English language, and neither did the British people (if you know anything about history, that is). If you live in a nationalistic fantasy land where revisionist history allows you to feel your culture is superior to another, then yeah, the British people created the English language. Sorry, that's not how it went down, though.
The great irony that you, and many of the nationalistic Brits here fail to realize, is that many of the spelling rules that your forefathers applied to "your" language were lifted from Latin and are totally arbitrary, not to mention that they were never intended for the language they were applied to (and the perpetrators of this tragedy felt English was too "barbaric" as it was, so they aimed to "Latinize" it). Also, London printers (most famous of which was William Caxton) took great liberties in the spelling conventions they adopted when trying to approximate the different dialects of Middle English. It was all they could do to somehow represent the vast variety in a standardized form.
After all, these printers were more blue collar skilled tradesmen than academics/scholars, and they had very limited resources to determine the spellings for words with roots and origins from sources as diverse as Latin, Anglo-Saxon/Germanic, Norse, French, and traces of Greek (and tons of different pronunciations and spellings circulating about). They were doing this amidst the very heavy accents found throughout London, and the spelling conventions they adopted were guesswork at best, and horrific improvisations at worst.
What's more, for those of you who want to trumpet the "ENG" in English, that's great. It stands for ENGles as in "Angles"... as in "Anglo-Saxons and Jutes," the original Germanic people who invaded the British Isles and conquered the indigenous Pictic peoples (ancient Celts). The ENGlish that the Anglo-Saxons spoke, now referred to as "Old English", is wholly incomprehensible to modern speakers (example). Indeed, it wasn't until the FRENCH Normans invaded and conquered the now established Anglo-Saxons that "your" language began to change to sound more like it does now (this gradual change is known as "The Great Vowel Shift"). Following the Norman conquest, English began to sound less Germanic and the FRENCH influences softened the language, and bolstered its vocabulary immensely. So, if you want to use the word "created" in reference to a language that is little more than the bastard child of the language of Germanic conquerors paired with the language of French Norman conquerors, then yeah... it was "created" in England all right.
Even then, during the "Middle English" period, "your" language sounded markedly different than it does now (example), and the spelling rules were anything but set. Again, those rules didn't formally emerge until the colonial period, and they were determined by a bunch of elitists/classists who had a funny belief that English should strive to be more "Latinate" because Rome, after all, was the greatest civilization of all time and Latin was the language of the educated/refined. So, if England wanted to be great, it needed a great language (not this barbaric "English" crap).... So, the stuffy old professors adopted a bunch of moronic Latin spelling and grammar rules that still plague ALL speakers of English today, and they were motivated by an inferiority complex of sorts, not by any great foresight about what was best or most functional for the language.
Go ahead and thump your chests some more. You are proud of a language spoken by warriors from distant lands who conquered the British Isles (obviously not called that at that time). Proud of the very same Germanic language, people, and culture that was then uprooted by FRENCH Norman conquerors a few centuries later, and eventually "refined" even more by native speakers who hated the language they spoke, who thought it was classless, and who thought it was too barbaric for it's own good.
Oh, and I haven't even mentioned that during the colonial period, especially the Elizabethan period (the time period of Shakespeare), the most "powerful"/fashionable dialect of English was a Midlands dialect, which was transported from England to the New World (in particular, the Southern colonies). There, in its new home, the Midlands dialect (and the Anglican variety in the North) changed *VERY LITTLE* compared to what happened in subsequent decades in England. In essence, Americans in the 1700's spoke English that sounded closer to Shakespeare's English (1500's) than the British did. Even now, after all of these centuries, one of the greatest ironies of all is that "Standard American English" sounds closer to how Shakespeare spoke than the "received pronunciation" that the British seem to think is the only proper English (both sound nothing like Shakespeare's dialect/accent would, though).
In fact, there are still several small islands off the coast of the Southern U.S.A. where you can hear many accents that, though not fossilized, are *much* closer to Shakespeare's dialect/accent than received pronunciation could ever hope to be. Okracoke is one of the places. And, Tangier Island is frequently featured as well because, until recently, it's community has been fairly sheltered from the outside world. Oh, and lets not fail to remember that many "AMERICAN" expressions and idioms that the British chide us about actually, *gasp*, originated in BRITAIN!!! And it works the other way around (phrases/words the we associate with British English nowadays once originated in the U.S.A.).
I can't think of any off the top of my head (it's been years since I've studied any of thist stuff), but it would surprise speakers of both languages that their "typically american/british" expression actually originated in the other country, fell out of fashion there, but remained fashionable in their version of English. Sometimes, an expression would migrate across the pond, fall out of fashion in its origin (becoming popular in the other country), then years later reverse the process. The whole time, the speakers of the language believe it is an "American" saying, when in fact, it originated from their very own language years before.
Oh, and lastly... for those who support the view that RP = the one and ONLY English, please introduce yourself to the 21st century and leave the classism and nationalism back in the past. The prestige of RP is a very class-based form of prejudice and a lot of the preference of Europeans for British English stems mostly from the prevalence of the BBC and its extremely important radio broadcasts during WW2. Not to mention the influence of the British Empire throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The only reason English has remained a dominant world language, and even solidified its position as a lingua franca of sorts, is because the American cultural/media juggernaut took up the mantle at about the time the British culture's influence on the world was waning.
The two languages are intertwined and vitally important to each other. Currently, the U.S. form is more influential as far as cultural reach goes, but British English is typically regarded with much more prestige because of historical precedent. To bandy about words and ideas like the british "created" English and the American did not is just ignorant. English is a malleable, dynamic thing that is *always* changing and, at any given time, American and British and Kiwi and Australian and even non-native speakers are "creating" the language by continuing to use it and adapt it based on an ever-changing world
When languages become "set" in stone and don't change, it's because nobody speaks them anymore. That's another reason British lexographers liked stealing rules from Latin so much. Those rules never changed because NOBODY SPOKE LATIN ANYMORE! Oh, and one last thing about Shakespeare, he (as did Elizabethans in general) used adjectives as verbs, and verbs as nouns, and nouns as adjectives, and, and, and.... You see, no matter what "rules" are set, language is hard to pin down and some of the most adept users of it are those who aren't bound by conventions or fanciful notions about the importance of pedigrees or precedence...
ArchnagelWorld of Warcraft CorrespondentMemberPosts: 27
Colour, Honour, Flavour. They just seem more grand than their American versions.
And please dont start the WW2 debate again... too many times this has boiled over into chaos. Too many people have strong feelings about it.
License or licence? Advise or advice? As a dutch national we learn british english in the schools, so when I moved to the States a few years ago it took me awhile to realize that what I thought were spelling mistakes were in fact not.
Those words are completely different, not just different spellings of the same words.
Advise is a verb, the act of offering an opinion, whereas advice is a noun and the content of the opinion offered. The same goes for license and licence.
License or licence? Advise or advice? As a dutch national we learn british english in the schools, so when I moved to the States a few years ago it took me awhile to realize that what I thought were spelling mistakes were in fact not.
Those words are completely different, not just different spellings of the same words.
Advise is a verb, the act of offering an opinion, whereas advice is a noun and the content of the opinion offered. The same goes for license and licence.
Comments
Football.
I'm just cool like that.
The world calls it Football. America calls it Soccer. Unfortunately because their version of football is a totally different sport..."Americanized Rugby" sorta. What I don't get is who came up with the name for it....why Football? You're mostly running with the ball in your hands. I have nothing against it, it's just always been one of those mysteries.
To me it's like the americans are trying to get away from the old yoke of England.
Relettering the language, renaming sports, driving on the oposite side of the road as the English... And much much more to "get away" from old England.
And yet, the americans refuse to modernize their measurements to what most of the modern world uses, and instead they guard their ancient non logical measurement system like it was the holy grail. Despite that it's a system they got from the English.
As for me? I use both... Like americans, I remove the u's when I feel lazy. When I'm feeling good, and remember my studies(I could have been a english teacher with my long forgotten education), I go back to the good old correct english.
Been in a bit of a lazy spell lately, like last 10 years, and now my written english is like my written norwegian... Dialect/Accented.
How do americans spell Diarrhoea then? And why am I so interested?
I live in the U.S..Florida to boot.. and I can say with confidence to just give it time...before you know there won't be need of debate. Unless you want to argue "Colour" vs. 'Colore"
It's simple, it's colour, and armour. These spellings were firmly in place and the correct spelling way before America became independent, they changed them to simply be anti colonel, same reason they drive on the right side of the road, a protest to be anti colonel. Color and Armor are simply the incorrect spelling the USA as a culture and a country took upon themselves to spell wrong and continue to teach new generations of their citizens to spell it wrong to keep up the anti colonel protest of their forefathers, the correct spelling will always be colour and armour, USA didn't create the English language.
I'm English, I've lived in England all my life. In school and university I used English spelling, because anything else caused problems with the teaching staff.
In my writing outside of academia, though, I use a mix of American and English spellings.
I grew up reading American comics. Most of my favorite writers are American. I studied American literature for a while at college and for the last decade I've been playing mainly American MMOs and posting on U.S. based forums.
I see it as a purely aesthetic choice, not a nationalistic one. I'd never spell "cheque" as "check" because it doesn't look as attractive on the page, even though it sounds identical when spoken. On the other hand, I think most "ou" words look cleaner and sharper on the page without the "u", so I choose to use the American spellings.
Just clarify - The Battle of Britain was between 10 July - 31 October 1940 and when December 7, 1941 at about 7:55 AM when Pearl Harbour was attacked.
Whereas the overall argument America involvement made it possible to win WW2 in years.. rather then decades, Britain hadn't fallen (as had eveyone else) but as Winston Churchill was quoted;
"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
Speech in the House of Commons (1940-06-18)"
Anyways... Armour, Colour, Flavour etc
"Obi-Wan Kenobi: We were decieved by a lie; we all were. It appears that SOE is behind everything, including the NGE! After the death of CU, the NGE became their new apprentice."
Yes, the USA didn't create the English language, and neither did the British people (if you know anything about history, that is). If you live in a nationalistic fantasy land where revisionist history allows you to feel your culture is superior to another, then yeah, the British people created the English language. Sorry, that's not how it went down, though.
The great irony that you, and many of the nationalistic Brits here fail to realize, is that many of the spelling rules that your forefathers applied to "your" language were lifted from Latin and are totally arbitrary, not to mention that they were never intended for the language they were applied to (and the perpetrators of this tragedy felt English was too "barbaric" as it was, so they aimed to "Latinize" it). Also, London printers (most famous of which was William Caxton) took great liberties in the spelling conventions they adopted when trying to approximate the different dialects of Middle English. It was all they could do to somehow represent the vast variety in a standardized form.
After all, these printers were more blue collar skilled tradesmen than academics/scholars, and they had very limited resources to determine the spellings for words with roots and origins from sources as diverse as Latin, Anglo-Saxon/Germanic, Norse, French, and traces of Greek (and tons of different pronunciations and spellings circulating about). They were doing this amidst the very heavy accents found throughout London, and the spelling conventions they adopted were guesswork at best, and horrific improvisations at worst.
What's more, for those of you who want to trumpet the "ENG" in English, that's great. It stands for ENGles as in "Angles"... as in "Anglo-Saxons and Jutes," the original Germanic people who invaded the British Isles and conquered the indigenous Pictic peoples (ancient Celts). The ENGlish that the Anglo-Saxons spoke, now referred to as "Old English", is wholly incomprehensible to modern speakers (example). Indeed, it wasn't until the FRENCH Normans invaded and conquered the now established Anglo-Saxons that "your" language began to change to sound more like it does now (this gradual change is known as "The Great Vowel Shift"). Following the Norman conquest, English began to sound less Germanic and the FRENCH influences softened the language, and bolstered its vocabulary immensely. So, if you want to use the word "created" in reference to a language that is little more than the bastard child of the language of Germanic conquerors paired with the language of French Norman conquerors, then yeah... it was "created" in England all right.
Even then, during the "Middle English" period, "your" language sounded markedly different than it does now (example), and the spelling rules were anything but set. Again, those rules didn't formally emerge until the colonial period, and they were determined by a bunch of elitists/classists who had a funny belief that English should strive to be more "Latinate" because Rome, after all, was the greatest civilization of all time and Latin was the language of the educated/refined. So, if England wanted to be great, it needed a great language (not this barbaric "English" crap).... So, the stuffy old professors adopted a bunch of moronic Latin spelling and grammar rules that still plague ALL speakers of English today, and they were motivated by an inferiority complex of sorts, not by any great foresight about what was best or most functional for the language.
Go ahead and thump your chests some more. You are proud of a language spoken by warriors from distant lands who conquered the British Isles (obviously not called that at that time). Proud of the very same Germanic language, people, and culture that was then uprooted by FRENCH Norman conquerors a few centuries later, and eventually "refined" even more by native speakers who hated the language they spoke, who thought it was classless, and who thought it was too barbaric for it's own good.
Oh, and I haven't even mentioned that during the colonial period, especially the Elizabethan period (the time period of Shakespeare), the most "powerful"/fashionable dialect of English was a Midlands dialect, which was transported from England to the New World (in particular, the Southern colonies). There, in its new home, the Midlands dialect (and the Anglican variety in the North) changed *VERY LITTLE* compared to what happened in subsequent decades in England. In essence, Americans in the 1700's spoke English that sounded closer to Shakespeare's English (1500's) than the British did. Even now, after all of these centuries, one of the greatest ironies of all is that "Standard American English" sounds closer to how Shakespeare spoke than the "received pronunciation" that the British seem to think is the only proper English (both sound nothing like Shakespeare's dialect/accent would, though).
In fact, there are still several small islands off the coast of the Southern U.S.A. where you can hear many accents that, though not fossilized, are *much* closer to Shakespeare's dialect/accent than received pronunciation could ever hope to be. Okracoke is one of the places. And, Tangier Island is frequently featured as well because, until recently, it's community has been fairly sheltered from the outside world. Oh, and lets not fail to remember that many "AMERICAN" expressions and idioms that the British chide us about actually, *gasp*, originated in BRITAIN!!! And it works the other way around (phrases/words the we associate with British English nowadays once originated in the U.S.A.).
I can't think of any off the top of my head (it's been years since I've studied any of thist stuff), but it would surprise speakers of both languages that their "typically american/british" expression actually originated in the other country, fell out of fashion there, but remained fashionable in their version of English. Sometimes, an expression would migrate across the pond, fall out of fashion in its origin (becoming popular in the other country), then years later reverse the process. The whole time, the speakers of the language believe it is an "American" saying, when in fact, it originated from their very own language years before.
Oh, and lastly... for those who support the view that RP = the one and ONLY English, please introduce yourself to the 21st century and leave the classism and nationalism back in the past. The prestige of RP is a very class-based form of prejudice and a lot of the preference of Europeans for British English stems mostly from the prevalence of the BBC and its extremely important radio broadcasts during WW2. Not to mention the influence of the British Empire throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The only reason English has remained a dominant world language, and even solidified its position as a lingua franca of sorts, is because the American cultural/media juggernaut took up the mantle at about the time the British culture's influence on the world was waning.
The two languages are intertwined and vitally important to each other. Currently, the U.S. form is more influential as far as cultural reach goes, but British English is typically regarded with much more prestige because of historical precedent. To bandy about words and ideas like the british "created" English and the American did not is just ignorant. English is a malleable, dynamic thing that is *always* changing and, at any given time, American and British and Kiwi and Australian and even non-native speakers are "creating" the language by continuing to use it and adapt it based on an ever-changing world
When languages become "set" in stone and don't change, it's because nobody speaks them anymore. That's another reason British lexographers liked stealing rules from Latin so much. Those rules never changed because NOBODY SPOKE LATIN ANYMORE! Oh, and one last thing about Shakespeare, he (as did Elizabethans in general) used adjectives as verbs, and verbs as nouns, and nouns as adjectives, and, and, and.... You see, no matter what "rules" are set, language is hard to pin down and some of the most adept users of it are those who aren't bound by conventions or fanciful notions about the importance of pedigrees or precedence...
Colour, Honour, Flavour. They just seem more grand than their American versions.
And please dont start the WW2 debate again... too many times this has boiled over into chaos. Too many people have strong feelings about it.
Those words are completely different, not just different spellings of the same words.
Advise is a verb, the act of offering an opinion, whereas advice is a noun and the content of the opinion offered. The same goes for license and licence.
Those words are completely different, not just different spellings of the same words.
Advise is a verb, the act of offering an opinion, whereas advice is a noun and the content of the opinion offered. The same goes for license and licence.
Thank you Kabaal, it makes sense to me now.