What is the language "British"?

Ian Astley tokyoi at mac.com
Fri Sep 1 09:15:10 UTC 2006


Good $whatevertimeofthedayitisinyourpartoftheworld, everyone.

Interesting that this topic has produced more responses than all the  
Windows rants put together.

Personally, I find that the real problem is not American English or  
British English or whatever. I once had the privilege of listening to  
a lecture by John Searle (not even in an English-speaking country at  
that!) and it was a couple of hours well spent. No trace of, Did he  
spell that with a zed or an ess -- or perhaps a zee? The real problem  
is rubbish English -- and there's more than enough of that around.

Turning to a slightly more on-topic tack, one of the things which  
frustrates me with just about any spell-checker on any platform is  
the way in which reactions to Trans-Atlantic differences have  
affected the way in which we spell. For example, in contrast to most  
"British English" norms, I insist on the -ize ending for verbalizing  
nouns because that is the traditional British spelling (and Bill  
Bryson, bless his American socks, is only one of the more recent  
writers to have his rants on this put into print); but I also prefer  
to retain the French etymology of words like colour (even if we only  
retain part of that reference!). Webster may have had a political  
point in introducing those orthographic changes to American English  
when he first brought out his dictionary, just as many peoples on the  
planet have a point in spelling English words as they hear them, for  
the simple reason that that is how they write their own language  
(e.g. Indonesia, which has been mentioned before).

I have done enough mucking about with altering set-ups and am  
wondering if there is any sort-of painless way of introducing my  
etymological neurosis into the resident spell-checkers on Unix systems?

Yours in anticipation of corrections to every comma in the above,

Ian A
(Brit on the other side of the planet)




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