this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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British Problems
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British Problems
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Is there really even a big difference between British english and American english besides a few alternate spellings (like colour vs color) and alternate names for things (like fries vs chips)?
See all, ear all, say nowt. Eat all, sup all, pay nowt. An' if th'ivver does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen.
Cost kick a bo againt a wo an' then 'it it wi' thi yed till it bosses?
I want to say this looks like Black Country ‘as she is spake’ but I’m only guessing. I could do the Yorkshire above it, but this is just noise. (am from deep south - ‘ampshire)
Potteries, although not very common to hear it these days. My granddad was the last person I knew that spoke like that, but that was some years ago. (“Can you kick a ball against a wall and hit it with your head until it breaks/bursts”)
I could care less.
Or could I?
Kreg / Craig
Ow, ow, ow, noooooo!
English (Traditional)
English (Simplified)
One's for divvies
To be fair, a lot, but certainly not all of Americanisms are actually relics of the English spoken and written at the time of mass migration to Northern America. Language in many cases evolved more rapidly in Europe. In a related way, quite a bit of the ways in which Mexican Spanish differs from Spanish Spanish sounds very archaic to young Spanish ears, or so I'm told.
That was utter claptrap made up by journalists to sell a few papers and has been completely disproved
I remember seeing a web site where they had the British flag next to "English" and the American next to "English (Simplified)"
There are a lot of subtle differences. That being said, they're mutually-intelligible. Even if you don't know the other variety, you can probably figure out just about everything from context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English
EDIT: Even that's not a comprehensive list, though. For example, style guides for American English typically use title case for headlines, where nearly all words are capitalized ("Sinead O’Connor Mourned in Irish Mountain Village Where She Once Lived") and British English style guides typically use sentence case ("Sadiq Khan wins high court battle over London Ulez extension"), though that's really a matter of style and not an absolute divide between the two.
Or how the British usually use "River" first ("the River Thames") and the Americans "River" second ("the Mississippi River") in names.