Re: World's worst software. What's decent?

From: Bill Sloman (bill.sloman_at_ieee.org)
Date: 10/22/04 

Date: 22 Oct 2004 04:54:12 -0700

Chuck Harris <cf-NO-SPAM-harris@erols.com> wrote in message news:<8eadndWyWI1fEeXcRVn-ow@rcn.net>...
> Pooh Bear wrote:
>
> >
> > Is the USA claiming to own the English language in preference to its
> > origin in England ?
>
> The Linguist Dr. Deborah Tannen wrote that the language spoken in the US
> today more closely resembles the English spoken in England 200 years ago,
> than does thelanguage spoken in England today.
>
> The reason is the vast size of the US compared to England. The language
> used in a small community can evolve through creative new words, meanings
> and phrases, without causing confusion, much more quickly than the language > used in a large geographically expansive country. Think of how the language > changes within cliques of teenagers. It drifts so quickly that one
> generation cannot readily understand another.

Teenagers are are special case - they use aberrant language with the
fixed intention of not being understood by the previous generation.
See also "thieve's cant".

The fact that the U.S. is geographically bigger than England doesn't
signify in this context - England has more different dialects than the
US, and a greater variation between the dialects, while Australia,
which is about the same size as the continental U.S.A. has hardly any
perceptible regional dialect variation.

> That being so, it can be argued that what you speak in England is the
> aberration.

Not really. English is spoken in a lot of places beside England and
the U.S.A. and no single dialect has any particular claim to
pre-emminence.

The aberrant spelling to which the OP was objecting, is a slightly
different case. Noah Webster "reformed" American spelling in 1828

http://www.ctstateu.edu/noahweb/biography.html

while the rest of us have stumbled on using Dr.Johnson's spellings.
Since English spelling embodies some six different schemes for coding
the phonetics of English into the Latin alphabet, there is probably
room for a lot more reform than Noah Webster's idiosyncratic
variations.

---------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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