Re: American and British (English)

On Jul 31, 7:21 am, "Alan Jones" <a...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Jim Karatassos" <jim.karatas...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:562630f3-16e1-489e-ab39-17239a671b15@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[...]> .....fascination about the differences and similarities in our language
and
the tantalizing hints they drop about who we are and what's important
to us.

[...]

Could you pin down some of those linguistic hints, particularly what you
believe they reveal about what's variously important to us?

Alan Jones

Fair enough, Alan. Thanks for opening this thread properly.

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"Aluminum" versus "aluminium." I've found that most of the British
find the American version very difficult to deal with, and many
amateur UK language enthusiasts (and US language detractors) will
pounce on "aluminum" as a typical example of an illiterate American
form.

The reality is, of course, quite different. The British version was
formed as part of the language reform movement, in a move that Eric
Arthur Blair would probably have labeled Newspeak had it happened a
few hundred years later. In the USA, the older form survived and
became dominant: privileging the memory of the discoverer rather than
the integrity of the names in the periodic table.

-----------------

Post WWII: as the USA assumed dominant-power status after the Suez
debacle, the British began to feel very defensive about marking the
differences between their language and the American version. Thus, "s"
forms of -ise/-ize gradually pushed out "z" forms, despite the strong
argument that can be made that Noah Webster's version of
standardization is much more valid than following a universal
Francophile model, and in spite of Oxford UP's continued insistence on
maintaining the etymologically-based two-form model.

------------------

The last of my examples is much more a style-guide note. The USA, in
searching for the legitimacy of certain forms it uses (one we've
recently discussed in the group is hope + to-infinitive or bare
infinitive) will frequently base its acceptance of primary US forms
mostly on Shakespeare and leave things as that. Other British authors
of that time period get very short shrift indeed. This tends to hide a
multitude of sins, and raises a larger question.

Why is Shakespeare so often seen as the end-all and be-all of English
literature in America, and thus as the main legitimate specifically-
English progenitor of American usage? Could it be that Shakespeare's
inflated place in the American version of the English canon has to do
with the fact that as a nation of nobodies-made-good, we desperately
need to assign pride of place among British authors to the
quintessential bootstrapper of Elizabethan society, despite the fact
that a very large number of professional Shakespeareans on both sides
of the pond dispute the authorship of his plays in part or in full? Do
we play down the other literary accomplishments of the age because the
life history of those who produced them do not support our national
myth of unrestricted opportunity, and we have as a nation a desperate
need to bolster that myth even to the point where it has marked the
language that comes out of our mouths and is printed in our media?

------------------------------------------

Anyone can certainly diagree with my speculations, but I don't think
anyone can seriously argue that Merriam-Webster's _Dictionary of
English Usage_ doesn't use Shakespeare as a catchall reference, hope
+bare infinitive is not hope's primary catenative form in the States,
the UK has never printed a book with the *** form "baptise" in it,
and the spelling "aluminium" is historically sounder than "aluminum."
But we'll see, of course.
.

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