US, UK and and our 'common' language

NicoleZ said:

The Parisians used to say that four days of American liberation saw more rapes than four years of German occupation. Then again, the Parisians aren't on speaking terms with the rest of the country.

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I had the misfortune of being there when DeGaulle's popularity was building up, and he was rabidly anti-American. I'm sure I could go to France now and have a lovely time. I still would feel that I'd have to have French to be comfortable there. I've always tried to learn the language where I've lived--without having facility in learning languages--and I learned German while living there. But everywhere else, either English has been predominant or, as in Japan and Southeast Asia, the locals were so interested in learning English--for economic advantage--that I just gave in and spoke English with them. I've tried learning Mandarin, Japanese, and Thai, though.

Lori_the_Hoosier said:

Sorry, my bad. Will is my husband, aka beachbum1958

Later: He went off on an aside because he's unbalanced, off his meds, or just a nasty, twisted little asshat

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Thanks. Maybe the haters will just stifle their instincts now. If not, I can ignore them.

sr71plt said:

Hmmm. I don't know who Will is. I also didn't realize that Mavramorn had a history here. It was just very strange for the poster to drop that sort of hate and to go off on an irrelevant LC aside.

What is amusing, though, is that, between the time I commented on Mavramorn's favorite stories list (including over fifty stories but only one author) and now that listing has been totally reworked and the sole favorited author no longer mentioned. How revealing is that?

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I'm not sure why he'd do that; no-one knows (or cares) who (s)he is, what are they trying to hide? You know, and I know that he had every one of beachbum1958's stories listed, what does he gain by deleting them now, you've already seen the list. This guy obviously wants to be Will, which worries me, but doesn't seem to affect him at all. maybe this guy turning up at our door is next.

Mavramorn said:

A long and expensive journey they paid for in America, to an American company; Australia gets fuck-all benefit from the US tourist trade, just like everywhere else in the world; so few Americans have passports that the worldwide economic effect of a few isolated groups of yanks doing a tour is almost invisible, no matter what your fuck-head inflated egos keep telling you. No-one kicked their arses onto the cruise ships, but they still come here with that condescending 'We're Americans, we come from the greatest country in the world, look how we graciously spend our spare change on you pathetic primitives' attitude - US tourist dollars have a negligible effect on the Australian economy, not when compared with our Pacific trading partners, so take your sneering superiority and condescending attitude and shove it up your arse, Gracie, surely it's about time for you to go and lose another argument with Lovecraft68.

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I am a Brit, I have been to Australia several times, my grandfather was an Aussie, and my sister and family live there now.

And I have lived in the USA for several decades, and know a damned-sight more Americans than you do. I'm a mountaineer, and have had Americans as travel companions on 4 different continents.

So I feel comfortable saying that besides being unnecessarily pugnacious, your description of Americans is just plain wrong.

NicoleZ said:

The Parisians used to say that four days of American liberation saw more rapes than four years of German occupation. Then again, the Parisians aren't on speaking terms with the rest of the country.

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We have a lovely apartment in Paris, on Blvd Saint Michel, overlooking Parc Du Luxembourg, but my husband refuses to stay there; he hates Paris, he hates Parisians, he says the Seine in the summer smells like an old gym sock, and the Parisians are the rudest, most obstructive, unhelpful, uncivilized waste of protein since they stopped eating each other; Paris Syndrome is alive and well, helped along enormously by the Parisians and their arrogance.

Our son-in-law is French, from Paris, and Will can't resist having conversations with him where he can drop in 'Waterloo', 'Agincourt', 'Trafalgar', 'Malplaquet', and 'collaborator'. I punch him to make him stop it, because Sam, my son-in-law is a lovely, sweet, polite boy who my stepdaughter thoroughly deserves, but I know Will once took her aside and told her that he was waiting for the news she was pregnant, because then he'd finally have proof he was having sex with her, and he was going to kill him.....

It's all an act, though; he loves being where we are, he's a fluent French speaker, his grandmother was French, and he's a French citizen; it's just Paris he hates.

We currently live in Fréjus, about midway between St Tropez and Cannes, and hardly anyone here speaks French anyway; the local dialect is a lot like my Cajun French, so I can make myself understood, whereas in Paris waiters would just stare blankly at me until Will came to my rescue. Down here, it's like Los Angeles; everyone's an English/American/Russian/Estonian/whatever actor, writer, porn-star, or wannabe supermodel; at the clinic, I'm advertising for a Russian-speaking Triage nurse, as a large percentage of the people we have coming in these days are Russians and FRR citizens who don't speak French, English, Italian or Spanish, the only languages we can scrape together at the clinic.

Why bother?

sr71plt said:

Yep, it's Qantas. I wasn't accusing you of having an alt. I'm not the one sniping on this thread, now am I?

The statement that Australia makes nothing from foreign visitors to Australia, though, is laughably naive and seems, at least in the statement made, to be couched in an unhealthy hate. It's not sniping to point out something that obvious. I pity you for having such an attitude.

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Ok re the alt thing, my apologies, Pilot. I misread.

It's the other guy who made the claim about Oz not making bucks from tourists, not me. I agree, that's a bullshit thing to say - and I will say that I thought Mavramorn's rant was over the top. Me, I just take the piss, lightly.

I still don't get Hawaiian shirts, though...

- edit: also, didn't know the back story from Lori about Will being stalked. That's seriously fucked up.

Hypoxia said:

Why bother?

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Why bother about what? Sorry, you lost me.

In her summer holidays from her final year at school and while at univeristy my wife worked as an au pair in Paris. It was the early 1960s. Her task was to look after an elderly couple so their son, daughter in law and grandchildren could go on holiday.

The old couple were frail but competent. Madame couldn't walk far so my wife did the shopping. Monsieur was blind. He had been a Professor of French Literature at the Sorbonne and among other things wanted my wife to read the French classics to him. He insisted that she should read them precisely and with a perfect French (educated Parisian) intonation.

My wife still speaks French like that. In Nord Pas De Calais where the locals speak with what Parisians would describe as a poor accent she stands out. She was a teacher and can still use her 'teacher's voice'. When someone cut in front of a queue in a Calais Hypermarket my wife let rip, telling the woman that there were other people in the queue just as important. The queue-jumper slunk away to join the back of another queue and our queue cheered my wife.

When we got to the till my wife said something to me in English and I replied.

The cashier asked, in French, 'Madame married an Englishman?'. My wife replied that she was English too which startled the cashier and the rest of the queue.

However my French remains appalling. My last French teacher in England was a Yorkshire man. He spoke French with a broad Yorkshire accent. After that I went to school in Australia. At the time they were very few French speakers in Australia and very few students studied French. I acquired a Strine accent to my French which I still have.

Even in Nord Pas De Calais my French makes shopkeepers wince. They can understand my wife perfectly but prefer me to speak English.

I grew up near Los Angeles in the 1950s and absorbed pachuco Spanglish, the words and accents. But when I took Spanish classes in JC (late 1970s) my teacher was an upper-class Cuban whose family had fled stateside post-Castro. The Cubano accent she imparted provokes snickers from Mexicans. Much later, I took full-immersion Spanish classes in Guatemala. (It's a major industry there.) That accent also makes Mexicans laugh.

Long, long ago, I was in a Mexico City boardinghouse with two lovely Scots girls working for a broadcaster. They voice-dubbed USA soap operas into telenovelas for audiences in Columbia and Argentina respectively, whose dialects are quite distinct from Mexico and the rest of the Spanish world.

Is Ænglish the extreme? I've read that Arabic and Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible.

Hypoxia said:

Is Ænglish the extreme? I've read that Arabic and Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible.

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The Chinese spoken in the tiny state of Singapore is highly varied and the dialects/languages are substantially/totally incomprehensible to each other. Note the Wiki article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Singaporeans

I have been fortunate enough to be born in the UK. spent a year in Germany, then 8 years living in the US before settling in Australia. My business takes me lots of places especially in Asia and through Europe and the USA several times a year. Most people in most places are pretty easy to get along with, particularly if you take the trouble to learn even the tiniest smattering of their language.

There are a few oddities that take some getting used to; for example the Japanese are the most xenophobic people on the planet - but they are also the most courteous and it's the safest, most crime free place on earth. So they always help you, even if you are a barbarian!

The French elites are unbearable - to most other Frenchmen as well as foreignors. They have all, whether socialists or Gaullists or bureaucrats attended the same colleges, the same ecoles, and believe with almost fervent religiosity their(elites) right to rule a highly centralized France - and not only France but Europe from the French island of Brussels.

But they are just as unbearable to the provincials as to foreigners. Outside of that elite in Paris, France and its people are great.

I can even get on with Texans - and their language is pretty weird.

Hypoxia said:

Is Ænglish the extreme? I've read that Arabic and Chinese dialects are mutually incomprehensible.

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At the University, my Asian foreign policy professor couldn't converse with my Mandarin language professor in Chinese even though they were married to each other. They had to use English or write notes (the written language is the same). She was from Beijing (speaking court Mandarin) and he was from Szechwan (speaking a Sian dialect).

Tw0Cr0ws said:

The people living in the Appalachians would sound right to Shakespeare.

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Well, yes and no. While people in the Appalachians do use words and forms that have fallen out of usage in Great Britain ("Fall" in place of "Autumn," and "I guess" in place of "I suppose"), most linguists I've read say that the accents are quite different.

That theory was bolstered by the fact that the written material from the Appalachians had what was perceived as a strong Elizabethan cast, but was actually a Jacobean cast...it was the influence of the King James Bible, which was usually the only book in the house, and the one most widely read.

Athalia said:

Well, yes and no. While people in the Appalachians do use words and forms that have fallen out of usage in Great Britain ("Fall" in place of "Autumn," and "I guess" in place of "I suppose"), most linguists I've read say that the accents are quite different.

That theory was bolstered by the fact that the written material from the Appalachians had what was perceived as a strong Elizabethan cast, but was actually a Jacobean cast...it was the influence of the King James Bible, which was usually the only book in the house, and the one most widely read.

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One of the oddities about the King James Bible is its limited number of different words, about 11,800. Shakespeare used some 22,000 and invented 10% of them.

Second oddity is that a lot of the KJ Bible's language was not Jacobean, it was older as large tracts were lifted wholesale from earlier translators, such as Tyndale; in fact most scholars reckon 75 to 80% of the KJB was lifted from Tyndales work for the Great Bible of 1538, 74 years earlier in the Tudor period and pre-Elizabethan.

electricblue66 said:

It's the other guy who made the claim about Oz not making bucks from tourists, not me. I agree, that's a bullshit thing to say -

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Yep. For what it's worth, tourism contributes about 6% of Australia's GDP, though some of that would be internal tourists.

And while USA isn't the biggest source of tourists, it's still one of the bigger ones; about 10% of short-term international visitors come from USA (fourth after NZ, China, UK) and I'd expect the American visitors would spend a bit more per capita than NZ or China.

sr71plt said:

At the University, my Asian foreign policy professor couldn't converse with my Mandarin language professor in Chinese even though they were married to each other. They had to use English or write notes (the written language is the same). She was from Beijing (speaking court Mandarin) and he was from Szechwan (speaking a Sian dialect).

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The major Chinese dialects are incomprehensible to the speaker of another Chinese dialect. There are jokes about a southerner tryin to speak northern.

ishtat said:

Second oddity is that a lot of the KJ Bible's language was not Jacobean, it was older as large tracts were lifted wholesale from earlier translators, such as Tyndale; in fact most scholars reckon 75 to 80% of the KJB was lifted from Tyndales work for the Great Bible of 1538, 74 years earlier in the Tudor period and pre-Elizabethan.

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You are quite correct, ishtat, in that much of the King James Bible was taken from Tyndale's version and others. Those other versions, however, did not become as popular as the King James Bible; IIRC, they were either tolerated as an addition to the Latin Bible or, in the case of Queen Mary, ruthlessly suppressed. So for most of those backwoods preachers in the Appalachians, The KJB was the definitive text because it was officially sanctioned by the Church of England. In fact, I would wager that most clergymen of today who use the King James Bible as their fundamental text haven't heard of Tyndale, either. Although they may have been aware that the Bible existed in earlier English translations, they consider only the KJB as the only divinely inspired, and therefore definitive, translation.

Again, if I remember correctly, most of the 20% to 25% difference was due to changes in the vocabulary and syntax of the language as it metamorphosed from Middle English to Early Modern English. But it's been years since I've seen the translations side by side, so I might be wrong about how extensive the differences are.

R. Richard said:

The major Chinese dialects are incomprehensible to the speaker of another Chinese dialect. There are jokes about a southerner trying to speak northern.

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There is a view that England has a similar problem.
Anything south of the Watford Gap is hopelessly out of synch with the rest of the country.

Athalia said:

You are quite correct, ishtat, in that much of the King James Bible was taken from Tyndale's version and others. Those other versions, however, did not become as popular as the King James Bible; IIRC, they were either tolerated as an addition to the Latin Bible or, in the case of Queen Mary, ruthlessly suppressed. So for most of those backwoods preachers in the Appalachians, The KJB was the definitive text because it was officially sanctioned by the Church of England. In fact, I would wager that most clergymen of today who use the King James Bible as their fundamental text haven't heard of Tyndale, either. Although they may have been aware that the Bible existed in earlier English translations, they consider only the KJB as the only divinely inspired, and therefore definitive, translation.

Again, if I remember correctly, most of the 20% to 25% difference was due to changes in the vocabulary and syntax of the language as it metamorphosed from Middle English to Early Modern English. But it's been years since I've seen the translations side by side, so I might be wrong about how extensive the differences are.

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They were more than tolerated as an addition to the Latin Text, readings from the Great Bible were required in churches by law for some 70 years (5 years of Mary excepted) before the KJB came into existence. It is also arguable that Cramners Book of Common prayer(1552) was even more influential than the various bibles because its language was repeated again and again in services, whereas bible readings were different each week

Don't think Tyndale wrote Middle English at all, even Morte D'arthur (1485) is clearly Early Modern rather than Middle English, though, equally clearly, Tyndale's was a later transitional form but fairly easily followed by a modern reader.

I reckon you would lose that wager. Any clergyman unaware of Tyndale should be sacked.

Wiki on Tyndale is not too bad:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale

RelentlessOnanism said:

I can assure you there are literally hundreds of different dialects in the UK - with many words that are incomprehensible once you leave a particular geographical area.

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I lived Oop North for a while in my younger days and I regularly astounded locals by pinning down their origins within five miles. I was equally astounded that they never realised that their accents were so distinctive.

British actors' inability to handle accents is not limited to American. Any British film or TV show involving country folk inevitably involves a dreadful all-purpose 'country yokel' accent. Even worse than Dick Van Dyke's cockney.

I would dispute that RP English is London-based. Oxford, perhaps.

The British upper classes were renowned as having an accent that convinced most people that inbreeding had resulted in them all having strangulated hernias. Some of them do sound more 'normal' these days, perhaps because the costs of maintaining stately homes has driven them to become more commercial and that requires the to sound 'normal' rather than ridiculous. The Royal Family, in contrast, has been regarded by many of the upper classes as being and speaking 'middle class' pretty much since the start of the 20th century.

To round off, it seems that autumn has finally arrived in the UK after a freak September heatwave, so I’m all on a-dudder.

Handley_Page said:

Until Caxton started printing in about 1480, the is "orb'd and sceptred land" had a great many languages, particularly split on the "Invasion principle" [ 'we we got invaded by the Saxons" ; "We didn't; we got it from the Goths" ].

As Caxton came from Kent but was Apprenticed in London, it might be assumed that English grew from there; I reckon that if Caxton had done his work in York or Newcastle, we'd all be speaking a different tongue.

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It is now generally accepted that there was no such thing as a Saxon invasion. Almost everyone else has tried invading us at some time or other, more or less successfully - except the Russians, which is ironic given that we spent nearly 50 years engaged in the Cold War. They include:

Romans - 55BC and 43AD although it is suggested that they were invited in 43AD
Vikings - numerous
Danes - 865 onwards, Cnut 1015
Norwegians 1066
Normans 1066
Danes 1069
French - 1216
Scots - at varying times, often in alliance with the French
French - 1377, 1405
Spain 1588
Jacobite Scots 1745
USA - 1778 (John Paul Jones)
French - in Wales 1797
USA - c1942 - invited

sr71plt said:

I had the misfortune of being there when DeGaulle's popularity was building up, and he was rabidly anti-American. I'm sure I could go to France now and have a lovely time. I still would feel that I'd have to have French to be comfortable there. I've always tried to learn the language where I've lived--without having facility in learning languages--and I learned German while living there. But everywhere else, either English has been predominant or, as in Japan and Southeast Asia, the locals were so interested in learning English--for economic advantage--that I just gave in and spoke English with them. I've tried learning Mandarin, Japanese, and Thai, though.

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There is a report that de Gaulle ordered French shore batteries to fire on US Navy ships off the coast of North Africa in WW2.
Hushed up because 'the French are our allies'.

sr71plt said:

At the University, my Asian foreign policy professor couldn't converse with my Mandarin language professor in Chinese even though they were married to each other. They had to use English or write notes (the written language is the same). She was from Beijing (speaking court Mandarin) and he was from Szechwan (speaking a Sian dialect).

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From what I have read there are roughly 1200 Chinese dialects, all mutually incomprehensible.

Tw0Cr0ws said:

There is a report that de Gaulle ordered French shore batteries to fire on US Navy ships off the coast of North Africa in WW2.
Hushed up because 'the French are our allies'.

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As a Historian I have to protest against such inaccuracies, Tw0Cr0ws. That was a territory under (Vichy) French control so it is highly unlikely if not downright impossible for de Gaulle who was seen as a traitor to France at the time could indeed have ordered it. That the Vichy French fired on Allied ships is really not to be wondered at after the hushed-down war waged by Churchill on France in Syria, Mers-el-Kebir, Alexandria, Dakaar and Casablanca after the French capitulation in 1940. Especially the British massacre of her former allies at Mers-el-Kebir left a deep scar on British-French relations even if F.D.R. Roosevelt is reported as having greeted the news with joy saying it proved to the world that Britain was willing to fight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir

The ineptitude the Allies showed when they tried to attack Dakaar in September that year also rather speaks against it as the aim was to get the French to overthrow the local Governor through pamphlets dropped by aircraft asking the Dakaar French to accept General de Brigade de Gaulle as their head of state. The mission was compromised weeks before it even left port and had to be abandoned on the spot when the French instead of embracing de Gaulle stood by their guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dakar

NicoleZ said:

...Especially the British massacre of her former allies at Mers-el-Kebir left a deep scar on British-French relations even if F.D.R. Roosevelt is reported as having greeted the news with joy saying it proved to the world that Britain was willing to fight...

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And not just fight, but fight with a ruthlessness that was staggering and that totally destroyed all notions of 'British fair play'. There is evidence that similar ruthlessness would have been applied had there been a German invasion in 1940. Little would have been ruled out.

As far as Mers-el-Kebir was concerned, it must also be remembered that until the Entente Cordiale was signed in 1904, France had been Britain's traditional enemy and, even after that, was never entirely trusted by the British. The establishment of the Vichy government reignited that mistrust; forget Perfidious Albion, that was Perfidious Gaul.