Re: Recommendations for DVDs for learners?

Phil wrote:
On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:12:23 GMT, Sean wrote:


Phil wrote:

On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:14:48 -0400, Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:

[...]
It's not really an American/British thing. They seem to have chosen to include one and only one spelling for most words, even when alternatives exist. In my youth, "dialogue" and "analogue" were preferred American spellings. I still think of "analog" as a computer and chemistry term, separate from the more general "analogue". "Dialogue" and "analogue" are both perfectly acceptable American spellings, just less common these days. They would have done better to include common variants. I hit this all the time, with words like "kidnaped" and "dreamt", which have undergone the same usage shift during my lifetime.

Learnt was the one I noticed most.

What did you notice about it? It has been the preferred British spelling for aeons, n'est-ce pas?


I learned British English in school and learnt to spell the word that way.
Later, when I moved back to the US, I learned that learnt was considered a
misspelling. However, I have also come across people from the UK that
insist on the British spelling of words like 'colour', 'centre', and so on
but have somehow learnt to spell 'learnt' as 'learned'.

For me, who never learnt *no* English in school, British or otherwise, "learned" and "learnt" are not different spellings of the same word, but two different words, indeed synonymous, but of different "register." I pronounce the former as /lRnd/ and the latter as /lRnt/.

I also have two words matching the spellings "dreamed/dreamt," "leaped/leapt," etc. It never occurred to me, in fact, that other people pronounced those the same way, and it was simply a spelling issue.

Bart
.

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