When someone from Britain speaks, Americans hear a "British accent"...

T

Terry Hancock

Well, there's your problem. He learned from engineers. Engineers
can't speak English. I was instructed in my "Engineering Statics"
class that a three-dimensional structure connecting non-coplanar
points in space was called a "tetrahedragon".

I am not kidding. This actually happened.

Cheers,
Terry
 
G

Grant Edwards

Well, there's your problem. He learned from engineers. Engineers
can't speak English. I was instructed in my "Engineering Statics"
class that a three-dimensional structure connecting non-coplanar
points in space was called a "tetrahedragon".

Watch out for the fire-breathing kind. They're especially
dangerous since they have multiple faces, so there's no
"behind" from which to sneak up upon them from... of... to.....
 
D

Dave Hansen

Precisely because there *is* such a thing as a saving. If I buy a $100
gumball for $80 I have achieved a saving of 20%.

FWIW, my dictionary has a usage note:

/Savings/ (plural noun) is not preceded by the singular /a/, except
loosely:"The price represents a savings (properly /saving/) of ten
dollars." In the foregoing, considered as an example in writing,
/savings/ is unacceptable to 89 per cent the Usage Panel.

(Words enclosed in /slashes/ represent italics.)

The dictionary? "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language, New College Edition."

Still sounds wrong to me, though.

-=Dave
 
D

Dave Hansen

Actually, I didn't, though I did respond to it. Please watch your
attributions.

Thanks,

-=Dave
 
T

Terry Hancock

Precisely because there *is* such a thing as a saving. If I buy a $100
gumball for $80 I have achieved a saving of 20%.

Nope, that's incorrect American. ;-)

You can say "I bought a $100 gumball for $80, saving 20%," or
"If I buy a $100 gumball for $80, I have achieved a savings of 20%."

(Although, you lose points for style with "achieved", and those
are awfully expensive gumballs). ;-)
 
J

Jack Diederich

AFAICT, in many parts of "The South", y'all is now used in the
singular (e.g. "y'all" is used when addressing a single
person), and "all y'all" is the plural form used when
addressing a group of people collectively.
"What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people?"
http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_50.html
A map from a US dialect survey. Click around for many more questions.

The question was a bit broken, it did not list "all y'all" and its
most glaring omission was "yous guys" The Philly responders selected
the next best option of "yous"

It is a bit odd that You'uns, yins, and yous are confined to Pennsylvania
and very distinct east-west regions inside PA at that (Pittsburgh vs
Philly orbits).

-jack
 
T

Terry Hancock

[typo: the word "four" is missing above in the definition]
Watch out for the fire-breathing kind. They're especially
dangerous since they have multiple faces, so there's no
"behind" from which to sneak up upon them from... of... to.....

Well, yeah, although the correct pronunciation is apparently
"te-tra-HEE-dra-GON".

(Wishing I had figured out how to type IPA symbols so you could
fully appreciate that ;-) ).

It was very distracting, though, subvocalizing "tetrahedron" constantly
during this guy's lectures. I suppose that might've contributed
to my poor grade in this class (I left engineering altogether very
shortly thereafter).
 
G

Grant Edwards

"What word(s) do you use to address a group of two or more people?"
http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_50.html
A map from a US dialect survey. Click around for many more questions.

Cool. While we're on the topic, has anybody else noticed that
"guys" is acceptible and commonly used to refer to a group of
women, but the singular "guy" is never used to refer to a
single woman (and most of the women I've asked think that "gal"
or "gals" is insulting). Likewise, "dude" is often used when
addressing a female but almost never when speaking about one in
the third person.
The question was a bit broken, it did not list "all y'all" and its
most glaring omission was "yous guys" The Philly responders selected
the next best option of "yous"

It is a bit odd that You'uns, yins, and yous are confined to Pennsylvania
and very distinct east-west regions inside PA at that (Pittsburgh vs
Philly orbits).

Eastern and Western Pennsylvania are practically different
countries when it comes to language and culture.
 
J

Jack Diederich

Eastern and Western Pennsylvania are practically different
countries when it comes to language and culture.

I'll buy that, I'm from Eastern PA (half PA Dutch) and I've only been
to Pittsburgh once. There is a very good reason for this, the six hour
drive is the same as from Philly to Boston (through NJ, NY, CT and into
MA). Alternatively you can drive from Philly to DC to Philly or
Philly to New York to Philly to New York in the same amount of time.

-jack
 
L

Luis M. Gonzalez

Grant Edwards ha escrito:
While we're off this topic again topic, I was watching a BBC
series "Space Race" the other night. The British actors did a
passable job with the American accents in the scenes at Fort
Bliss in Texas, but the writers wrote British English lines for
them to speak in their American accents...


Continuing with this off-topic thread about british accent and
movies...
I've always asked myself why do Hollywood movies about the Roman Empire
show the Emperors and all the nobles speaking with british accent?
They were italians for God's sake!

Anyway, I can't imagine Julius Caesar speaking like Vito Corleone...
 
M

mensanator

Luis said:
Grant Edwards ha escrito:


Continuing with this off-topic thread about british accent and
movies...
I've always asked myself why do Hollywood movies about the Roman Empire
show the Emperors and all the nobles speaking with british accent?
They were italians for God's sake!

Anyway, I can't imagine Julius Caesar speaking like Vito Corleone...

Of course not! Vito Corleone was Sicilian.
 
S

Steven D'Aprano

Continuing with this off-topic thread about british accent and
movies...
I've always asked myself why do Hollywood movies about the Roman Empire
show the Emperors and all the nobles speaking with british accent?
They were italians for God's sake!

You would rather they speak in an Italian accent?
Anyway, I can't imagine Julius Caesar speaking like Vito Corleone...

:)

The BBC adaptation of "I, Claudius" had all the upper-class Romans
speaking in posh English accents (think of Queen Victoria), and the
servants, soldiers, slaves etc speaking in Cockney and other working-class
accents.

This, by the way, is closer to the historical truth than many people
imagine. The Latin we learnt in school was so-called "Classical Latin".
Your average Roman centurion spoke something that was to Classical Latin
as your boyz in the hood speaks to standard American English.

In the recent movie "Alexander the Great", which was nowhere near as bad
as the reputation it got (okay, it wasn't that good, but neither was it
bad), they did a similar thing. The Greeks spoke in very polished
English accents, while the Macedonians (who by their own admission had
been goat herders only to generations before) spoke in broad
Irish/Scottish accents, and the lower class they were, the thicker the
accent.
 
D

Dennis Lee Bieber

I think where the people are getting confused is that it is (arguably)
acceptable to use "their" in place of "his or her", as in:

"Should the purchaser lose their warranty card..."
It gets even stranger...

"One should be prompt in mailing their warranty registration"
--
 
S

Steve Holden

Terry said:
Nope, that's incorrect American. ;-)

You can say "I bought a $100 gumball for $80, saving 20%," or
"If I buy a $100 gumball for $80, I have achieved a savings of 20%."

(Although, you lose points for style with "achieved", and those
are awfully expensive gumballs). ;-)
I must have been working at NASA at the time; they are well known for
embiggening prices.

regards
Steve
 
S

Steve Holden

Duncan said:
Rocco Moretti wrote: [...]

So English is spoken only in the South East of England, except London?
I think you should also disbar the queen (unless she's already
classified as a Londoner), due to her apparent confusion between the 1st
person singular and 1st person plural :).
There are special rules for the monarchs, who are expected to refer to
themselves in the first person plural.

Oscar Wilde understood this. When he boasted that he could speak
extempore for a minute on any subject of a challenger's choosing someone
shouted "The Queen", to which he replied "The Queen, sir, is not a subject".

regards
Steve
 
M

Michael

Steve Holden wrote:
....
Or is "the green tomato" also unacceptable?

Of course it is. We all know* it should be "the green fried tomato", or "the
killer tomato".

:)

(is it me, or is the subject line for this thread silly? After all, what
accent would you expect from someone in the UK? However, that said, the
concept of a *single* British accent is a silly as the idea. Sillier even
than the suggestion that the two lines below are British vs American:
American: Minnesota is behind 7-0. The Vikings are behind 7-0.
British: Minnesota are behind 7-0. The Vikings are behind 7-0.

Or even these lines:
American: The war department has decided to cancel the program.
British: The war department have decided to cancel the program.

A better one might be:
British: "They installed tunnelling for the petrol pipes made of grey
coloured aluminium."
American: "They installed tunneling for the gas pipes made of gray
colored aluminum."

(I think :) I do my best with grammar, but can fail spectactularly, more
often than I'd like :)

Bad grammar flies at the same speed as the pedants who decide that the way
that other people talk is wrong. If the majority of people use a language
one way, and a small number of people say "you're wrong", who's right?

Is it the people who speak the language in a shared way that they all
understand, or the people who are setting rules based on how people *used*
to speak and *used* to define words? (NB, I *did* say majority above ;-)
Does /human/ language _require_ backwards compatibility?

;-)


Michael.
 
S

Steve Horsley

Steve said:
Then again, there's room for infinite disagreement about these topics. I
mentioned a while ago that I disliked the English on a bumper sticker I
liked, which read

"Some village in Texas is missing their idiot".

Several people defended this, saying that a village could use the plural
possessive "their". I personally found it odd (and essentially
non-grammatical) not because either the singular or plural forms should
be mandated but because this one manages to mix them up. So

"Some village in Texas are missing their idiot"

would be better (though it sounds like the kind of thing only the idiot
alluded to would say), while my preferred choice would be

"Some village in Texas is missing its idiot".

Strangely, the one that scans most naturally to me is the first
one. Maybe its because the sentence starts by talking of a
village in Texas singular point on a map, but the idiot in the
second half is one of many inhabitants who have noticed his
absence. Yes, it is mixing singular and plural from a syntactic
point of view, but not so badly after interepretation into mental
images.

The one that always makes me grit my teeth is "You have got to,
don't you?". Well no, I do NOT got to, actually. Shudder!

Steve, Brung up in norf London.
 
D

Duncan Smith

Steve said:
Duncan said:
Rocco Moretti wrote:
[...]


So English is spoken only in the South East of England, except London?
I think you should also disbar the queen (unless she's already
classified as a Londoner), due to her apparent confusion between the 1st
person singular and 1st person plural :).
There are special rules for the monarchs, who are expected to refer to
themselves in the first person plural.

Oscar Wilde understood this. When he boasted that he could speak
extempore for a minute on any subject of a challenger's choosing someone
shouted "The Queen", to which he replied "The Queen, sir, is not a
subject".

Yes, although I'm not actually sure where the 'royal we' comes from; and
we (Brits) are technically subjects rather than citizens. But if
northerners are not English speakers because we use words like 'aye'
(although we say far less understandable things than that) I think the
queen should be similarly classified for using the 'royal we' :).

Duncan
 

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