"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 06 Dec 2015 09:33:06 -0500, Gary Woods
wrote:

"Christina Websell" wrote:

Americans think they speak English,

I should probably remain silent and be just though a fool, but:

I never thought I spoke English, though I understand a lot of it passably.
Watching "Last of the Summer Wine" has taught me there are subsets of
English that might as well be Swahili!

You never watched Rab C Nesbitt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDsoSaChP0
--

I have to admit that "extreme" Scottish can be difficult, but my father came
from Kilmarnock. I was also married to a Geordie so I'm good! I never
heard a UK accent I couldn't understand except "extreme Belfast"

On Tue, 8 Dec 2015 14:08:15 Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
CT wrote:
Martin wrote:

I lived in a coding environment. I don't recall ever writing "color".

Me too. I always make a point of ensuring that I always write "colour".

It does slightly annoy me when I have to use API calls that use "color"
though, as it doesn't look neat!

Nor does colour, if you are French! And what about programme?

And disk?

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK

On 08/12/2015 21:07, Christina Websell wrote:
"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 06 Dec 2015 09:33:06 -0500, Gary Woods
wrote:

"Christina Websell" wrote:

Americans think they speak English,

I should probably remain silent and be just though a fool, but:

I never thought I spoke English, though I understand a lot of it passably.
Watching "Last of the Summer Wine" has taught me there are subsets of
English that might as well be Swahili!

You never watched Rab C Nesbitt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDsoSaChP0
--

I have to admit that "extreme" Scottish can be difficult, but my father came
from Kilmarnock. I was also married to a Geordie so I'm good! I never
heard a UK accent I couldn't understand except "extreme Belfast"



Surely you are not calling Extreme Scottish as English.
You said that English only evolves in England.
You cant have it both ways.

On 9/12/2015 7:54 AM, Christina Websell wrote:
"Janet" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
says...

"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 6 Dec 2015 09:12:51 +1100, Fran Farmer
wrote:

On 6/12/2015 8:43 AM, Christina Websell wrote:
"David Hill" wrote in message
...
On 05/12/2015 20:44, Christina Websell wrote:


Americans think they speak English, I can assure them that they
don't.



Glad that has been sorted out once and for all.

grin Americans used to speak English once: now it's American.

I saw a very interesting TV show quite a few years ago on just this
topic. It suggested that the English now spoken by Americans is more
like the English spoken in the UK a few centuries ago than the sort of
English now spoken in the UK.

The show cited both words still used by Americans that have changed use
over time in the UK and the accent. One example I recall is the way
Americans still use the word "kettle" (ie, a cooking pot, not a spouted
water boiling thingamabob) which is the way it used to be used in the
UK
centuries ago. Also the accent in the long "a" when American say
"bath"
is the way it used to be said in the UK centuries ago.

The way bath is pronounced in UK depends on where one comes from.
--
English is constantly evolving and it evolves from the UK.

Nonsense. English is like Japanese Knotweed; once it leaves its native
habitat and escapes into the wild, it rapidly adapts to new conditions
and can no longer be said to belong exclusively to Japan or the
Japanese.

it's our language

Hardly! It used to be numerous other peoples' furrin languages before
we acquired them second hand.

Maybe henceforth you're going to eschew the use of any such word that
came from Latin, French, German, Hindi, Irish, Dutch, Norse, or Greek.

Janet

True English only evolves in the UK.

As a number of people have already pointed out, even in the UK, the form
of English used and evolving there is a mongrel of mixed origins.

On 9/12/2015 12:50 AM, Gary Woods wrote:
Timothy Murphy wrote:

I'm writing this with an american spell-checker.

I see a new reality show:


Linguist's death match!

Webster's vs. the OED!!!

:-)) I'm a huge fan of the OED but the trouble is that the 20 volume
big version I own, so often tells me that words that I prefer to spell
in the traditional British way are just as valid when I spell them the
US way. Very disappointing when I want to put on my pedant's hat and
insist that a certain word MUST be spelled a particular way.

Martin wrote:

On 8 Dec 2015 13:57:31 GMT, "CT" wrote:

It does slightly annoy me when I have to use API calls that use
"color" though, as it doesn't look neat!

It's no worse than reading an American book.

Well, quite, but a book is "read only" (ha!). I always *write*
"colour".

--
Chris

Martin wrote:

Most people don't mix languages.

Au contraire :-)

--
Chris

Christina Websell wrote:

English is constantly evolving and it evolves from the UK. Because we are
English and it's our language. Americans speak American. Do you have a
faucet in your house, does your car have a hood or fender? I rest my case.

I just looked at the Oxford English Dictionary list of new words for 2015.
There are well over 1000 so I looked at the 24 words starting with "b":
backronym, bahala na, balikbayan, baon, barangay, barkada,
barong tagalog, barong, baro’t saya, batchmate, bhelpuri,
biomethane, birdhouse, blazar, blue star,
bluff charge, bluff-charge, bluff-charging, Blu-ray,
boiler room, brûlée, brûlée, bukkake, buko.

Evidently over half are foreign words.
The only words that could be claimed as "English English" are batchmate,
which apparently means someone in the same year at school or college,
and possibly birdhouse, though I suspect this has a special meaning.

It is obvious, I think, that English is not "evolving from the UK".



--
Timothy Murphy
gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin

In article ,
Martin wrote:

However, it is NOT true that most reasonably literate users of the
word 'colour' change their usage as a result of using such environments,
and it is common for the comments to use 'colour' except when referring
to the name.

I coded when the choice of colours was green on black.

That was never the sole option. Coloured pens on graph plotters go
back to the 1950s, and colour printing devices to the 1960s. CRTs
as terminals date only from the 1970s, though a few (such as the
Tektronix 4014) go back further. And black-on-white devices (paper
tape, cards, printers and teletypes) lasted until well into the
full-colour era.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

On 09/12/2015 12:41, Timothy Murphy wrote:
possibly birdhouse, though I suspect this has a special meaning.

I think that's an Americanism.

Andy

On 08/12/2015 21:50, David Rance wrote:
On Tue, 8 Dec 2015 14:08:15 Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
CT wrote:
Martin wrote:

I lived in a coding environment. I don't recall ever writing "color".

Me too. I always make a point of ensuring that I always write "colour".

It does slightly annoy me when I have to use API calls that use "color"
though, as it doesn't look neat!

Nor does colour, if you are French! And what about programme?

And disk?

Well, we have hard discs and the Americans have hard disks. But we both
have compact discs and diskettes.

Confused yet?

Andy

"David Hill" wrote in message
...
On 08/12/2015 21:07, Christina Websell wrote:
"Martin" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 06 Dec 2015 09:33:06 -0500, Gary Woods

wrote:

"Christina Websell" wrote:

Americans think they speak English,

I should probably remain silent and be just though a fool, but:

I never thought I spoke English, though I understand a lot of it
passably.
Watching "Last of the Summer Wine" has taught me there are subsets of
English that might as well be Swahili!

You never watched Rab C Nesbitt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDsoSaChP0
--

I have to admit that "extreme" Scottish can be difficult, but my father
came
from Kilmarnock. I was also married to a Geordie so I'm good! I never
heard a UK accent I couldn't understand except "extreme Belfast"



Surely you are not calling Extreme Scottish as English.
You said that English only evolves in England.
You cant have it both ways.

Yes I can, I'm talking about accents now.

"Janet" wrote in message
.. .
In article ,
says...

"David Hill" wrote in message
...
On 06/12/2015 17:16, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 05/12/2015 20:44, Christina Websell wrote:
Americans think they speak English, I can assure them that they
don't.

"Do you speak English?"
"Yes, and I understand American"

Bob Heinlein, Glory Road. And he was a Yank...


I remember going on a AAA course at Motspur park in the mid 50's. The
course was headed by Jeff Dyson who was the national head coach.
As he was lecturing he would often come out with "and I say unto thee".
On that course was a lad from Cornwall, it wasn't till the 3rd day I
realised he was talking English,between his accent and his dialect.
Also when I was market gardening outside Hastings in the early 60's we
had
a driver come down form Fort William to pick up some stuff we were
selling. My Boss was Irish but had been a fighter pilot in the war,
Margaret was Sussex born and bred and owing to my Father being a
Captain
in the RFA I had been to many parts of the UK when he was home and we
were
on board ship with him.
I found myself acting as an interpretor between My Boss and the driver.
So much for a common language in the UK.


I so disagree with this. I can understand every accent and dialect in
the
Uk, and I'm surprised by this post. As I said upthread my only
difficulty
is with *extreme* Glaswegian.

Then I doubt very much you have ever heard Doric, or broad Ayrshire.
Galloway or Aberdeen.

Janet


I think I might have. My father came from Kilmarnock.