Re: [Lingo] British English

[CL <az.4tlug@example.com>]

On 02/06/2011 05:23 PM, Keith Bawden wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 17:01, Kenneth Burling<burlingk@example.com>  wrote:
> > > British English? What's that? THERE'S NO SUCH THING!
> >
> > I think that the main issue is that most American's assume that
> > Britain is England, and nothing more.  When we are saying british
> > English, we are thinking English as it is spoken in England.
>
> I assumed "British English" to mean Received English pronunciation and
> Oxford Dictionary spelling.

I assumed no such thing.  I recall seeing a postwar BBC or Pathe film in 
grade school that said there were something like 3,000 separate 
languages spoken on Anglia before radio leveled the playing field and 
Mancunian English won out.  They were featuring two old crones who were 
the last native speakers of some Pictish tongue and half a dozen other 
villages from around the UK where only five or six people could speak to 
each other.  Wow, the UK is just like the Ozarks!

I assume the same can be said of Japanese.  If you've ever heard a 
sansei or yonsei "Japanese-American" speak what their grandparents 
taught them, you have to wonder which planet they really came from. 
Even modern-day Japanese from the same towns can't understand those 
dialects any more.

--
CL