Re: Merriam-Webster's Unabridged vs Oxford English Dictionary

Mark wrote:

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 12:52:25 GMT, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I imagine, despite it being set in Hawaii, he thought he was writing a
novel in British English. If he'd used those terms (and I must admit
I'd never heard the 'tanning beds' one myself), perhaps it would have
sounded self consciously artificial to him. Oh well, perhaps I'd
better stop trying to imagine what he was thinking...

If an American novelist puts dialog in the mouth of a Briton, doesn't
the dialog use British vocabulary?

Sure, more or less convincingly :) And vice versa.

Yet David Lodge, who lived here for several years (he describes his own
experiences in *Changing Places* and its sequels), puts non-American
words in the mouths of American characters. (I haven't read all of
Anthony Burgess yet, and I don't recall any American characters, unless
some turn up in *Earthly Powers*, but I doubt he'd make the same mistake
-- he too taught at an American university for a while, the City College
of New York, in fact, and my mother, who worked in its Registrar's
Office, said he always turned in his grades late.)

Let me guess - were you reading an Americanised edition, with American
spellings? Why do American publishers do that? Alter British

Lodge's American publisher is Penguin. Do they do that?

And how is that relevant? If they were going to alter the orthography,
why wouldn't they alter the unfamiliar or misleading vocabulary, as is
done to Harry Potter? (It is legally impossible to get the original
Harry Potters over here. Someone would have to buy one there and carry
it back with them.)

Er, but aren't things unfamiliar simply until you learn them? If
Americans, remarkably, want to buy into a bit of British culture, why
wouldn't they be able to cope with the vocabulary and spellings that
go along with it? As far as I know, when US children's television
series began to be imported en masse over here, kids quickly picked up
on what eg. 'recess' was. No problem.

I doubt the orthography and vocabulary are altered in serious fiction.

But as to the relevancy, I hold my hands up, I was just going off on
one. My only recent experience of what's bothering me here was the
purchase of an American edition (I happened to be on holiday and
couldn't wait to get into it) of Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.
A very nicely produced edition it is too. But I did wonder, when I
came across the Americanised spellings. Was the editing really
necessary? Wouldn't a typical American reader, realising that the
author was British, take what in fact are very few differences as they
are, and get on with it? What are American publishers trying to
protect their readership from? Okay, that's probably not the reason.
I'd just like to know why it's common practice to do this kind of
editing in the US, when I doubt that encountering the original
spellings would pose difficulties for anyone.

After several recommendations, I bought the cheapest of several editions
-- the only one that had the three volumes in a slipcase -- slowly
struggled through the first two volumes, and never bothered with the
third. It's lousy as a novel -- whenever he wrote himself into a corner,
he simply invented a new gimmick.

Some well-known British novelist in an essay reported his shock upon
opening an American edition of one of his novels and finding the
punctuation all funny: <space en-dash space> had been replaced with
<em-dash>, single and double quotes were reversed, and periods and
commas were inside the quotation marks. (It was probably Anthony Burgess
or David Lodge; there's a very outside chance it was Martin Amis.)

Yes, I think I'm familiar with the same story, although like you I
can't remember who it was. I agree that Anthony Burgess is a very
likely candidate. At the risk of sounding inconsistent, the imposition
of local conventions of punctuation and typography etc. doesn't offend
me in the same way. Similar changes could well happen here between
different editions anyway, according to purpose, market, forms of
publication or simply a publisher's house style. Just think of the
very different presentation of an extract published in a magazine.
Having said that, I would have thought respect is due towards some
authors for whom these aspects are very important.

Apologies if this has got off topic. I realise these are more cultural
concerns than linguistics ones. I still want to know why Americans
generally receive this kind of protection from alien spellings, when
it's seen as unnecessary in most of the rest of the Anglophone world.
Honestly, you can rest assured, American civilisation wouldn't crumble
if readers there occasionally encountered 'centre', 'colour' and all
the rest. In fact, I don't really see why they can't experience some
alien vocabulary too, pavements and all.

I'm not aware that Americans "generally" receive such protection. Harry
Potter and His Dark Materials are both children's literature and are
thus a special case. I doubt the Houghton Mifflin Hobbit differs from
the Allen & Unwin Hobbit in so much as a jot or tittle. (LotR, of
course, is not a children's book.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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