No one is sure who first said it, but most of us will agree that “Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language”.<\/p>\n
To Americans, Britain is a strange place where fish have fingers<\/span>, cars have bonnets<\/span> and people collect<\/span> children. Or are we the strange ones for putting the baby carriage<\/span> in the trunk<\/span> instead of putting the pram<\/span> in the boot<\/span> \u2014 or for pronouncing words the way they’re spelled?<\/p>\n Both versions of English claim to be the standard that everyone should learn: British English<\/b> for its thousand-year history and the works of William Shakespeare, American English<\/b> for its popularity in business, tourism and present-day culture.<\/p>\n One thing that makes American English easier to learn is the fact that, generally speaking, it’s been standardized<\/b> by the film and music industry. People may speak with a Fargo<\/a> accent or a Maine accent or a Texas accent, but they can all understand each other very well (accents from the Deep South being the exception). In Britain, it’s difficult for someone from Yorkshire to understand someone from Cornwall. “Standard” Oxford English is spoken in, well, Oxford.<\/p>\n American English may be a little harder to learn because it absorbs and invents expressions<\/b> as fast as it needs to \u2014 borrowing from youth slang, from ethnic vernacular<\/span> and from the areas of science and technology. But that doesn’t mean that anything Americans speak is slang (as I’ve often heard claimed in Europe).<\/p>\n Most schools in Germany will let you choose which kind of English<\/b> you wish to learn, as long as you are consistent<\/span> in using it. Yet several times, I’ve heard from American parents here how their children came home in tears after their British-educated teachers<\/a> reprimanded<\/span> them for using what they considered “non-standard” English.<\/p>\n That’s a cruel<\/span> thing to do to somebody in the 10th grade<\/span>. After all, the fact that every one of you can read this is proof that American and British English are still the same language<\/b>. It’s easy enough to learn one or the other variety and then the differences between the two.<\/p>\n One of the most obvious<\/span> differences<\/b> is in spelling. We dropped the ballast of all those extra u’s (as in “colour”) that came in through French. We got rid of unnecessary double letters like the second “l” in “travelled”. We also made verbs with Latin and Greek roots<\/span> end in “-ize”, saving “-ise” for those of French origin.<\/p>\n Actually, it was one person who did this: lexicographer Noah Webster<\/b> (1758\u20131843), whose birthday is on Saturday. Webster decided that the new American nation needed an American language to cement<\/span> its cultural identity. In 1783, the year the American revolution ended, he produced The American Spelling Book<\/i>, followed in 1784 by a grammar book and in 1785 by a reader<\/span> that contained inspiring texts by American authors.<\/p>\n Webster was right in realizing that culture and language are connected<\/b>. Language isn’t just about words, but also about gestures, nuance, and the choice of what’s spoken or left unsaid. The pioneers who shaped the nascent<\/span> United States turned their backs on British tea, waistcoats<\/span> and fortnights<\/span>, inventing the vocabulary they needed and becoming as direct as they had to be.<\/p>\n To the British, we Americans seem loud and uncultured; to us, they seem quaint<\/span> and effeminate<\/span>. But our two countries remain linked by a language that we (mostly) still have in common.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No one is sure who first said it, but most of us will agree that “Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language”. To Americans, Britain is a strange place where fish have fingers, cars have bonnets and people collect children. Or are we the strange ones for putting the baby carriage in the trunk instead of … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[22,16,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1754,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions\/1754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A choice to make<\/h2>\n
One man’s work<\/h2>\n