From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Dec 2 12:54:59 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id D53F437B400 for ; Sat, 2 Dec 2000 12:54:57 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 3669 invoked by uid 100); 2 Dec 2000 20:54:52 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14889.24987.995695.443566@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2000 14:54:51 -0600 (CST) To: "Erik Rothwell" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: OT: Britishisms (Was: Pronunciations) In-Reply-To: <124406241@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ X-Message: You should get a better mailer. Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Erik Rothwell types: > What a lot of Americans seem to miss is that American English is a minority= > language compared to the vast wealth of nations and peoples who speak prop= > er Standard English (what Americans like to call British English.) > > Colour, valour, labour are the Standard spellings... similarly, Standard En= > glish drops its final -rs and such. When you learn to speak English anywher= > e but America or Canada, you learn with Standard English pronunciation. Cra= > zily enough, Standard English has many more vowels than American English...= > I believe it's 26 or 28 to just 12. > > Furthermore, the -ise / -ize difference comes from word origin: if the word= > origin is Latin you use -ise, if it is Greek you use -ize. My favorite britishism is technic, which in american english is spelled technique. I quite happily adopted the british spelling of that one. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message