[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

[James R. Johnson]

"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."

Who says cultural imperialism is a one-way street?  It's not just Americans
who think they're almost always right.


James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 7:30 AM
To: jack.macdaddy at gmail.com; wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

On 19/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at 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...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
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