#^kerry

[multicolourmayhem]

Hi?

Wow, we haven’t posted here for ages. Seems a bit cosy though. :3

~Kerry

[multicolourmayhem]

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'I can be strong without the Scheiße, yeah'

[multicolourmayhem]

my properly nuanced feelings on english dialects

On our main Tumblr I reblogged a post with a language selector - it showed pictures of a Union Jack and an American flag; the Union Jack was next to some text saying ‘English (Traditional)’ whilst the US flag was accompanied with ‘English (Simplified)’. Someone made a call-out post responding to it, explaining exactly why the post came over a bit problematic.

At the time I had just enough spoons to read the response, apologise and take down the offending post, but not to process my feelings about these sorts of things in detail.

Whilst I do prefer my own written dialect very strongly, especially on a visual level, that doesn’t mean I think others are ‘inferior’. And I definitely haven’t got any issue with other spoken dialectal variants! I couldn’t care less whether people call lifts elevators or biscuits cookies or sweets candy or roundabouts rotaries and traffic circles. I don’t mind whether you pronounce the R at the end of words or not, or say REsearch instead of reSEARCH. I don’t think American speech or accents are ‘simplified’ compared to British, Canadian etc speech. That’s a bit of a misnomer. I think the graphic was referring to spellings in any case; the full graphic also has Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Simplified) and that refers to the script not speech.

Neither Commonwealth/Irish nor American spellings are phonetic and they’re both difficult to master. Where ease of use is concerned I don’t think either is ‘better’ as both of them have classes of words that are easier to use in one dialect than the other.

I do not hold people in contempt because of where they come from. This is pointless nationalism. I don’t care very much for that sort of ideology. I have criticised some aspects of US culture and politics but this is because we’re currently stuck here, don’t feel very happy about it and I think many people would in fact agree that there has been a lot of harmful and destructive policy, especially foreign policy and domestic economic policies, coming from the US and its allies, including the UK and Australia.

I have got a few problems with American spellings (let’s just ignore my subjective feelings, they’re not relevant at the moment), not because I think Americans are ‘wrong’ because of where they’re from and what they were taught, but because of the reasoning behind the changes - they’re cosmetic changes that don’t actually solve the underlying problem - that English orthography is a shambolic mess. Please remember I’m criticising an idea, not individual people. Obviously if you were brought up using those spellings and told to use them at school and see them on signs and things I understand!

A word like ‘neighbour’ becomes no more phonetic when dropping the ‘u’. Reversing the final letters in words like ‘centre’ and ‘fibre’ doesn’t solve much when there are other classes of words that have the sounded letter before a silent e, like ‘bubble’ and ‘mantle’. Dropping L’s in words like ‘travelling’, again, doesn’t solve the problem when there are other words with doubled letters. ‘Grey’ is fine in a language that contains words like ‘hey’ and ‘weigh’.

There is the etymological argument that the ‘u’ in words like ‘honour’ wasn’t present in the Latin root but the English words that contain the u came in through French. But any argument that American spellings are generally ‘more etymological’ falls apart when one looks at spellings like ‘analyze’, which is further from the root than ‘analyse’ - ALL English spelling systems contain odd artefacts or misinterpretations of etymology, most of which occur in ‘neutral’ words like ‘ghost’, which gained its ‘h’ by the work of Dutch typesetters who didn’t actually know English that well.

I know spellings were a bit wonky before the beginnings of standardisation in Britain in the 17th century but they had started to settle before any American reforms were established.

When Webster turned up with his American dictionary he declared a bit of a war on ‘excess letters’ and his proposed reforms were a bit more wide-ranging. People didn’t adopt all of them - his ideas were a bit more extreme - but they were different enough to distinguish themselves from usage in other anglophone countries.

Some of my frustration with written (again, not spoken) American usage also comes from annoyance at large American computer companies* {{cough Microsoft cough Apple cough}} wrongly thinking their dialect is the only one worth using.This is ridiculous as they know full well their products are used outside the US. Of course I’m not saying they shouldn’t include American spelling checkers and user interfaces but they have an English-speaking user-base outside their home country. I’m tired of having spellcheckers underline words like ‘favour’, ‘defence’ and ‘practise’ because they’ve forgotten not all their users are American, or defaulting to English (US) even if you’ve set your computer to English (UK) or English (Canada) or another variant. Or not making user interfaces available in multiple English dialects. Making user interfaces in only one dialect of English is going to confuse children learning a different one at school. Their teachers and parents may teach them ‘favourite’ but if they see something like ‘FAVORITES’ (like in the OS X Finder) in large letters - or if Microsoft Office is set to the default English (US) and is autocorrecting all their variant spellings - they’re going to be confused. I’ve developed a habit of disabling spellcheckers online but I can do that because I’m a good speller. People who use Commonwealth English spelling variants and have dyslexia or just struggle with spelling haven’t got that luxury, and these American spellcheckers are just going to confuse them - ‘is it centre or center? My spellchecker says center so I’ll go with that!’ causing them to lose marks on essays. (And don’t even get me started on websites that have multiple languages available for the user interface, but only have English spellcheckers!)

None of this is because I want to bring back the British Empire or want the UK to dominate international discourse as it did before the Second World War and most of the former British colonies/dominions/protectorates gaining independence. That’s rubbish, I don’t think any one country should dominate international attention. I also don’t think English should be/has to be the dominant world language, as the reason why it is in the first place is to do with the British Empire and American cultural imperialism (which is an indirect result of the British Empire in any case).

This is the last I’ll say on the subject, once I’ve reblogged this to our main Tumblr. We’re currently on hiatus there for our mental health - we have exams coming up and essays and loads of other things and we need to look after ourselves.

*In Microsoft’s defence however, they’ve included a Commonwealth English user interface in Windows 8, labelled ‘British English’, and both MS and Apple have included multiple English variants on their mobile devices.

~Kerry