On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree jack.macdaddy@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, it was me, I did rant, I do apologise, but I'm just pissed off with proper English being treated like this. You have Wikipedia in Klingon, in tiny tribal languages, and now in Scots (and I'm Scottish btw) - which is basically as similar to correct English as American-English is - at least I think most native English-speakers can probably read it.
I think this is a sheltered understanding brought on by being Scots and thus having a working comprehension of the dialect in the air - it's certainly one of the less easy ones for an outsider to encounter. I have had to explain to Oxford students that what they thought at a glance was Middle English was, in fact, early modern Scots...
To put it in context, Scots is comprehensible to the average resident of Chicago if he thinks for a bit, skips a couple of difficult words ("leid" always throws people), and reads it to himself in an accent. The writing of the average resident of Chicago is far more comprehensible to most Scots than that.
Why not? Ok, I ranted, but this not an illegitimate point, why should we (and I say that because you have a ".uk" address) be forced to accept Americanisms? If you're British, do think we should start changing our spellings to American ones? Start changing our grammar too?
No, and I think this is a strawman argument. Every article I write has been in "correct" British English, barring the usual errors and a couple of stylistic quirks I blame on reading Usenet too long. No-one has changed the grammar or the spelling; no-one has "forced me" to accept Americanisms and I very much doubt anyone shall.
someone at Wikipedia ages ago wrote to me that he thought it was fine for articles in the English section to remain in the dialect relevent to their subject matter - he basically said, if it's about the UK it can be in English, but everything else is to be in American-English, but called English - and he said he was British!
The only hard-and-fast rule is that where there is dominant usage of a particular dialect for a particular topic we use that dialect.
So, an article on a Royal Navy destroyer talks about it being "armoured", whereas an article on the same ship when in American service would use "armored". JFK got an _honorable_ discharge from the Navy, but Ted Heath served in the _Honourable_ Artillery Company.
Where usage is contested - "petrol" or "gasoline" is the most hard-fought one I can think of - the compromise is simply to use the first dialect in which the article was written. Hence we have articles on "Labour (economics)", related to the "Labour movement", which also has articles on "child labor" and "manual labor". Yes, it looks a little messy - but they're the same concept, and content is preferable over form.
As to your citation of "aubergine" and "eggplant" - we have the same article serving for "Rosa gallica", "Gallic Rose" and "French Rose", and it smells just as sweet. There is a redirect at Londres for London, for Beijing at Peking, one at Bombay for Mumbai and one at Calcutta for Kolkata. It's all just different names for the same thing.
There are some usages of American English which look glaring to a British-trained eye - "In 1945, Churchill wrote Truman that..." - but these can generally be redrafted into a suitably neutral phrasing ("In a 1945 letter to Truman, Churchill noted ..."), and no-one objects to that. There are likewise expressions in my usage that look glaring to an American, but offhand I can't think of any - I see no reason anything I write shouldn't be restyled to be easily comprehensible to both.
I mean there are several issues here: cultural imperialism, ambiguation (because of the many differences in American-English and English usage), and English learners learning to spell incorrectly and talk like Americans - why is it wrong to resist that?
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
The concept of English as a monolithic entity living somewhere in Kensington from which variants have sprung worldwide is now outdated; from the point of view of the writers of the first edition of the Britannica in 1770ish, you and I are speaking a degraded and foreign language. (Back then, plural's was still an accepted construction!)
Recently, I read Alford's "The Queen's English", dated about 1865. He angrily writes about Americanisms (though not using that term), about speakers of English writing various completely wrong barbarisms. Some are alien to me - I'd never heard of "diocess" for "diocese", but apparently the /Times/ insisted on using it. He states that exclamation marks - which he terms "notes of admiration", the term not having then been invented - are superfluous to the language and should be abhorred. To describe someone as a "talented" writer is "about as bad as possible", and likewise the word "gifted".
(Though, interestingly, he approves of verbing nouns, noting that a century before "to experience" was hated by scholars. Plus ca change...)
The language changes; there is no sense in fighting it, because one may as well try to split atoms with a chisel. The era of modern communications will invariably simplify previously divergent spellings, just as it has smoothed over the difference in regional accents in the past, and caused a small number of languages to become massively dominant. It's all the same process...