this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Shit Americans Say

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • British English: LTS
  • American English: rolling release
[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That implies that eventually, everyone will move to American English.

American English is more of a soft fork than "bleeding edge"

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

Some English used in the US was deprecated on main, but it still was in use in the fork.

American English used a number of things that fell out of fashion in GB/UK, but the US kept them. It also doesn't help that some non-major GB dialects were over-represented in some early settlements

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Honestly moving to american english would be a good thing for britain. I've seen even native mfs failing to understand each other's pronunciation. British english has something like 18 vowel sounds but only 6 vowel characters. Multiple letters have the same sound and a single letter can have multiple sounds. That's not what i call an alphabet. Even american english has lots of unnecessarily complexity, but it made a step in the right direction. Ideally, many more such steps should follow.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What are you talking about? Is this a fucking ai bot because this comment makes no sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Lol. Kids spend months studying phonics in grade school because brit english resorts to multiple vowel combinations to express different vowels. https://www.englishradar.com/english-pronunciation/english-vowel-sounds/

Consonants are even worse, in many cases there is no way to know how to pronounce a word just by its letters, you have to know its pronunciation already. In general there are many rules and tons of exceptions. GH sometimes is pronounced F, while S is sometimes pronounced SH. Why? When? No real guidelines there.

Some of these rules have been simplified in american english, so for instance colour became color. That's a good thing because the only real argument against it is preserving etymological roots, which nobody gives a fuck about.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Huffing 30kgs of american exeptionalism per day ends up damaging about 90% of neurons by age 25.

Poor guy. 😥

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I think American English (simplified English - as a yank, I think that should be the official term) is close to an XFCE or *box spin. Things like the dropping of "u" in words like colour were done for printing efficiency.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I want Americans (I am one), to start saying aluminium so badly

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Aluminum is one where I think Americans have it correct. The British chemist who isolated it wanted to call it alumium, but it didn’t fit with the Latin-derived naming schemes of elements used at the time. Someone else suggested “aluminium”, where as the guy who isolated it went with “Aluminum”. So I say we stick with aluminum, or go to alumium cuz it sounds cool.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

alumium sounds like onions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Both are accepted as legitimate by the scientific community so it's pretty much the reason why America still calls it Aluminum.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

"Alumium" would definitely be more correct than "aluminum", since it's spelled "aluminium" in the vast majority of languages across the world.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Eh, I'm much keener on returning the letters we dropped for whatever reason.

Traveler -> traveller, armor -> armour, etc.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most differences in UK-US English are due to the US sticking with original pronunciations of words, with changes being made by the UK, OR by the US focusing more on Latin-derived pronunciations of worlds of Latin origin. It's literally "The US didn't change the language drastically, the UK just changed the words and pronunciations of things and decided that the ones who didn't change are wrong"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Interesting, since this comment talking about the way "aluminium" is spelled directly contradicts the part about Latin pronounciation

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Little known fact: in addition to independence, the United States also claimed primary ownership of English as spoils of the war. 😁

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

We're in the US, SPEAK AMERICAN!!!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago