Re: A non-native ruminates, with some questions

On Feb 17, 10:14 am, Aatu Koskensilta <aatu.koskensi...@xxxxxx> wrote:
How do native speakers,
American, British, Australian, what have you, feel about nationally
incongruous idioms, spelling, choice of words? That is, provided there
are no serious grammatical or orthographic errors, does a text
involving, say, both peculiarly American and British idioms or
phrasing strike a native reader as odd? (I have in mind texts that do
not fall in the "International English" category.)

Not odd although misuse annoys me. Having an "English" protagonist in
a novel refer to the trunk of the car rather than the boot or a
Canadian refer our national police force as the Mounties rather than
the RCMP usually indicates an author who has not done his or her
homeworka and is annoying but not as a matter of English useage.

The English language has been so fragmented for so long that almost
anything can be acceptable and is usually not commented on. Mind you,
the person speaking is not always intelligible but that's another
matter.

Add to that, a fairly large non-native English speaking immigrant
population in places like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the USA and
I suppose, more recently in the UK will have strange usages too. One
accomodates to all this.

Some spellings can be a problem. An early spell-checker kept
insisting to a collegue and I that 'catalogue' was mispelled. It
finally took an American English instructor to point out to us Irish
and Canadians that catalog is the US spelling.

On the other hand I really find the American dating convention of
Month/Day/Year ( e.g 02/17/2009) to be very annoying. We all should
be using the ISO Year/Month/Day format, in my opinion.

John Kane Kingston ON Canada
.

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