• Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      That implies that eventually, everyone will move to American English.

      American English is more of a soft fork than “bleeding edge”

      • tiredofsametab@kbin.run
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        5 months ago

        Some English used in the US was deprecated on main, but it still was in use in the fork.

        American English used a number of things that fell out of fashion in GB/UK, but the US kept them. It also doesn’t help that some non-major GB dialects were over-represented in some early settlements

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Honestly moving to american english would be a good thing for britain. I’ve seen even native mfs failing to understand each other’s pronunciation. British english has something like 18 vowel sounds but only 6 vowel characters. Multiple letters have the same sound and a single letter can have multiple sounds. That’s not what i call an alphabet. Even american english has lots of unnecessarily complexity, but it made a step in the right direction. Ideally, many more such steps should follow.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Lol. Kids spend months studying phonics in grade school because brit english resorts to multiple vowel combinations to express different vowels. https://www.englishradar.com/english-pronunciation/english-vowel-sounds/

            Consonants are even worse, in many cases there is no way to know how to pronounce a word just by its letters, you have to know its pronunciation already. In general there are many rules and tons of exceptions. GH sometimes is pronounced F, while S is sometimes pronounced SH. Why? When? No real guidelines there.

            Some of these rules have been simplified in american english, so for instance colour became color. That’s a good thing because the only real argument against it is preserving etymological roots, which nobody gives a fuck about.

          • hondacivic@lem.sabross.xyzOP
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            5 months ago

            Huffing 30kgs of american exeptionalism per day ends up damaging about 90% of neurons by age 25.

            Poor guy. 😥

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      I think American English (simplified English - as a yank, I think that should be the official term) is close to an XFCE or *box spin. Things like the dropping of “u” in words like colour were done for printing efficiency.

    • Repple (she/her)@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Aluminum is one where I think Americans have it correct. The British chemist who isolated it wanted to call it alumium, but it didn’t fit with the Latin-derived naming schemes of elements used at the time. Someone else suggested “aluminium”, where as the guy who isolated it went with “Aluminum”. So I say we stick with aluminum, or go to alumium cuz it sounds cool.

  • VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Most differences in UK-US English are due to the US sticking with original pronunciations of words, with changes being made by the UK, OR by the US focusing more on Latin-derived pronunciations of worlds of Latin origin. It’s literally “The US didn’t change the language drastically, the UK just changed the words and pronunciations of things and decided that the ones who didn’t change are wrong”

  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Little known fact: in addition to independence, the United States also claimed primary ownership of English as spoils of the war. 😁

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    As I’ve pointed out before, the United States is home to more native English speakers than the next three countries combined; none of those countries is England. English is 5th. England doesn’t get to dictate how English works anymore. It’s America’s language now, and the way we do it is the correct way.