Are there many brits on able2know?

Without locking and loading first?

Or is that vice versa.....

He wore a formal jacket?

I just give orders! No technicalities, please!

You know, people have lost wars over these kinds of technicalities.

What does a colony of prisoners know, eh?

one of those southern Aussie states was founded by a respectable (er?) Englishman, not a felon........

MY state.


Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2003/jun03/article2.html

Actually, we're kind of pissed off about the whole thing.

Having convict ancestors is very chic.

Really? Since when?

I thought people from Britan spoke English?

And you say WE sound funny



beef dripping butties? uh........yeah.

I'm bi-lingual. I speak Yankee AND Tex-mex.

Apparantly though, not English.

Hardly anyone speaks English any more, Chai. Certainly not the Brits. You want English, read Shakespeare or, better yet, Chaucer.

poppycock - language is fluid, it doesn't stagnate in one era in order to remain proper.

I never claimed otherwise, k. Still, there are certain proprieties that should be observed, e.g. not writing N E 1 when you mean to say 'anyone.' In the city where you and I both live, k, the English language hasn't been heard in about 150 to 200 years.

You say you agree and then you say you don't. I was talking to the new housemate (born in portugal, schooled in england, germany and Oz) and I opined for the english language umbrella to be divied up into english, australian, american, etc.

I 'spect everyone has these, whether declared by some court of officialdom or not....

li'l k, I agree that language is a living, fluid thing which (inevitably) changes over time. I think I'm just being grouchy and unhappy with the direction that the most recent changes seem to be taking. I suspect that if it hadn't been for the invention of the wireless radio and television, which in tandem have shrunk the world down to the size of a marble, English, American and Aussie would now be three separate languages, pretty much mutually unintelligible. Possibly there might even be two different languages spoken in North America as well, because by the mid-19th Century the vernacular of those living in the American South was quite distinct from the language spoken in the North. Today, because we all see the same movies and TV shows, these distinctions have become muted. There are still plenty of location-specific terms but we now know what they mean. We know that when a Brit speaks of a 'lorry', he/she really means a truck and -- as I understand it -- they no longer spell jail in that outlandish way as 'gaol.'

However, I'm still adamant about the fact that in Boston no local person has spoken English in close to two centuries.

So, locals speak 'Merkin, then?

Nah, they speak a weird dialect of pure Bostonese. This is a language where all the Rs are dropped from words where they belong and then reinstated in words where, in English, at least, they don't belong. For example, 'plumber' in Bostonese become 'plummah.' But Cuba is rendered as 'Cuber.' Just one example. They also have vocabulty variations that can be amusing, e.g. calling a liquor store a 'packy' and referring to any fizzing soft drink, such as a cola, as 'tonic.' You won't hear either of those anywhere else on the North American continent. Again, these are but random examples.

mmmmm, ok, but you yourself called it a dialect. Not a language. I thought New Hampshirites and NYers also did weird things with their Rs.

Dialect, schmyalect. There's always been some question as to at what point a dialect becomes so divorced from the mother tongue that it is no longer a dialect but a separate language. For example, Norwegian and Swedish are considered to be totally separate languages. But, actually, they are pretty well mutually intelligible. Estonians who live far enough north in Estonia to be able to pull in Finnish TV channels have told me that they used to watch world news on Finnish TV during the Soviet occupation because they had little trouble understanding the Finnish language, being Estonian-speakers themselves, inasmuch as both are Finno-Ugric languages.

<BTW, do you think we've been successful in highjacking this thread from the Brits? >

In Brazil they speak portuguese, but my portuguese housemate sometimes has a hard time understanding them.

Ok, well, I know I can't understand half of what is being said on abfab or monty python......