Misc > Anything goes...
The English Language
Becster:
*grins* I LOVE pear-shaped. One of the best British phrases ever...
Aha, I forgot about Sneakers and Trainers...
...And American's spell it aluminum. ...Aluminium...they like leaving out vowels, don't they? XD
I personally pronounce scone with the hard 'o' too, and I think putting emphasis on the 'sc' bit (sck-on) sounds 'posher'...
Strawberry:
Yeah, I commonly use the word "pear-shaped" here, its fun to use
lol, I remember constantly using that word pear-shaped on the phone to my American cousin and she didn't have a clue what I was talking about until I explained clearly the meaning of "pear-shaped"
Ando:
--- Quote from: ~*~Lunar Eclipse~*~ on February 25 2006, 05:57 am ---Accents just dont make sense to me...o_O I dont understand how people can speak the same language in a different way...theres probably a very good reason for why it has happened...I dont get it though
--- End quote ---
It's actually quite simple. Let's say a number of people are living together in a village. They create a language of their own, social rules and laws and yadda yadda... but after awhile, the number of people living in that small place has increased so much that some of them have got to move. So they do, but they don't have to create a whole new language because of that, right? But as you might understand from reading Shakespeare, languages change over time. So the people that moved from their original setting slowly start to do some changes in the language, and more and more changes are added for every generation.
At the same time, the people who stayed in the village are developing the language just as those who moved do, only they go a whole other direction. For example, this language's word for "dog" is uggr. After some generations, the grand-grandchildren of those who moved might spell this as [ugr] whereas those still living in the village spell it [ughr].
To complicate it even more, let's assume that these two groups of people are living in the very north and the very south of a country, respectively. Then those who stayed in the village might be trading and socializing with people who live in another country close to where they are, thus borrowing words from this folk's tongue. The same goes for those who moved to the other side of the country, only they are influenced by a whole other language. In time, these two dialects may even develop into two different languages.
Yeah, something like that. I know that that's to simplify it a bit, but you get the point, right, Lunar Eclipse?
Time-Machine:
--- Quote from: Becster on February 25 2006, 06:58 am ---...And American's spell it aluminum. ...Aluminium...they like leaving out vowels, don't they? XD
--- End quote ---
We also pronounce it Al-oom-in-um, and I guess it can also be pronounced Al-oom-in-ee-um. (I didn't learn that until I met a guy from Canada a few years ago who pronounced it like that...I was way confused, thinking he was talking about some mythical element...)
And I lot of people from Europe and Canada seem to pronounce Z "zed"...that's probably the only one that left me the most confused when I first heard it. It sounded like a bad sci-fi movie villain. I was like "What's a Zed???"
lol
Becster:
Yeah, American's say 'Zee' don't they...that makes me think of a happy expression...like 'WHEEEEEEEEE'
...
...
...'ZEEEEEEEEEEEEE!'
Haha.
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