Actually only the former British Colonies still use that form of Centre. Just like Colour. The rest of the world uses Center and Color. We call it the Queens English, or Kings depending on who the monarch is here in Canada. As being right next to the US our products and TV shows display both on written forums. Also if you teach english as a second language say in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and even Germany and Russia you use the US english. So for countries that English is not the first language all their English texts are in US english. Therefore most of the world knows US english spellings that is why it is labelled as International English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_English_Language_Testing_System?wprov=sfla1
'To' is a preposition in English used to connect a relationship of some kind between ideas, objects, times, places, and more. It can be used, for example, to describe movement. "Jane walks from A to B." 'Too' is an adverb, which means it describes the behaviour of a verb. In English, the word 'too' has two primary definitions: As synonym for 'also' (this is the simplest usage) As an exclamation of excess Consider the following sentence: "He has too much to do, too." The first too highlights some amount of excess, the to joins the idea of him having "too much" to the infinitive of the verb 'do,' and the last too indicates that this is in addition to something else. The same statement could be rewritten more clearly: "He has an excessive amount of something to do as well." Now, I am neither a linguist nor a professor so unfortunately I cannot be more precise, but I hope I helped elucidate things a bit for you. English is a very complicated language and difficult even for native speakers to master precisely, including some of the cheerful blokes on this forum. Cheers
If its an action its to, otherwise its too. Me too, going to, walking to, You too But many Brits get it wrong, so dont worry. Actually many Brits just write 2 which gets my goat. Lesson 2 is where, were, wear and we're.
"Too" means "also". "To" is a preposition generally indicating direction, plus other uses. "We are going to the video game store." "Let me come, too!"
And there were multiple dialects of Old English- Wessex, Northumbrian, Mercian and Kentish just for a start. Then the Danes showed up and the "English" of the Danelaw changed rather dramatically. It was never unitary or standardized. And that's even before the Francophone Normans conquered everybody. And it all remained different; Chaucer (a Londoner) milked a lot of humour in the Reeve's Tale from northern dialect. Meanwhile, the Gawain poet, from somewhere perhaps in Staffordshire, would have been almost incomprehensible to him, as he remains to this day for most nonspecialist modern readers. Nor is it true to argue that "British English" - or rather, the Queen's English (RP, Oxbridge English, posh English), since you'll hear very different Englishes in Aberdeen and Swansea and Newcastle - has remained the One True Unchanging English down the centuries. English has changed just as much in London over the last 250 years as it has in the Colonies, and George Washington and George III spoke much more like one another than either spoke like anyone living today.
Now that we have that all cleared up (different slangs, accents and dialects vs. different country regions happens to all languages in all countries) we should question why native english speakers have such hard times or even refuse to learn other languages, say like Spanish, or Portuguese, or Chinese, or Korean ......... Working in a multi-cultural environment, at least that´s what I experience every day. Somehow it seems to me they are lying comfortably in their english-is-the-world-language bed. There seems to be no need or pressure to dive into foreign languages. Is this just my impression? And must I change my medication?
In Plymouth, we (or at least the Janners, I’m not originally from round these parts) use the word “to” at the end of a question. For example if we want to know where JD is when he’s on his holidays, we would say “Where’s JD to?”
Generally, yes. Native English speakers are in the privileged position of naturally speaking the world's lingua franca, which means there is not often the necessity to learn another language since you can expect many non-native-English-speakers to have learned it as a secondary language. You can get by in a lot of the world just by using English (or a very broken version of it with non-native speakers). Many younger generations pick up on English as a second language through exposure to Hollywood or the Internet since many popular movies and TV shows along with popular websites tend to be in English or whose userbase primarily speaks English. That doesn't mean there aren't any multilingual native English speakers. There are a lot of native English & Spanish speakers in the southwest US, for example. I, myself, am fluent in German and possibly solicitr as well. My uncle is fluent in Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish on top of being a native English speaker. So, they do exist, but probably not as widespread as the rate of English as a second language. Cheers
That´s a very enlightening answer. Thank you for that. English is indeed a very pragmatic language, probably the reason why it became a universal world language. I´m a native german, fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, but I wouldn´t recommend foreigners to learn German for A) NOT exactly being a pragmatic language (german grammar anyone?) and B) being spoken in two and half countries in the world. Still, getting into the roman-latin languages gave me a whole wider view of life in general. I´m really grateful for that.
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It's one of those cases as well, where I generally imagine a lot of confusion comes from non-native speakers not quite grasping how which vowels are placed next to each other in which order, and where in relation to consonants, are instructions on how to pronounce the sound, and if it's hard, soft, long, etc. Which is slightly harder to work out with the US spellings where publishers having stuff printed dropped a bunch of letters to save money, knowing native speakers would be better than 50/50 at guessing what the word was supposed to be, since we can autocorrect for typos in languages we understand, from the context of neighbouring words.
May I chip in on something? Writing as a linguist of sorts (I hold first-class honours in the subject, although sadly don't work in the field; I'm also a qualified copy-editor and entry-level member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading on hiatus), I see here a conflation between the Queen's English and RP. One can speak the Queen's English (dialect – vocabulary, syntax) in a Black Country or Glaswegian accent, for example, just as you can speak the Black Country dialect in RP. RP is an accent, the clue being in the P of Received Pronunciation.
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The way the Queen speaks, vs how everyone I live around day to day does, is a great example of mutually unintelligible dialects XD
Well I once lived in Siberia for 6months with the aim of picking up Russian and whilst I learnt to read Cyrillic fairly quickly found it virtually impossible to actually practise oral Russian as every darn Russian I met simply wanted to practice their English on me and refused to converse in Russian. A similar story happened in my month in Japan again no local would speak Japanese and insisted on speaking English and I went a whole month Harding speaking a word. Perhaps if Id gone to a big city like Moscow or Tokyo I'd have had more success at learning the local lingo
There was a mix when Old English first started and it did become somewhat standardised (Bede is a good example) even with some 'Dane' words and continued evolving up to this day. When the Normans came it didn't affect the people as Anglo-Saxon continued as normal for the main part of the population it was only Barons who had to learn both French and Old English but above Barons they used a form of French, there were different versions of French as well. Saying that, it was a Norman King that re-introduced Anglo-Saxon as the language to speak at court.
I was actually recently pointing out to some folks why it actually shows a bit more depth of linguistic understanding on the part of those doing it, when translating a manga or anime and instead of just lazily picking one that's seen as stereotypically "slow" or "stupid", they rewrite a character with a Kansai accent to speak a regional dialect of UK English with longer vowel sounds, or say, cast a voice actor from Minnesota.
I've had the same experience in many countries around the world. Once they hear you speaking English, that's all that the locals will use themselves. Most recently in Iceland, I was looking forward to hearing some Icelandic, but no, they all spoke almost exclusively in English. Kinda takes the fun out of traveling to some extent.
Bede, standardized English? No, the venerable historian wrote mostly in Latin, and the occasional bits of English are clearly in 8th-century Northumbrian. The only movement towards any unification of A-S occurred under Alfred and his successors, with "Classical" West Saxon becoming pretty dominant south of the Thames (and being perhaps over-represented in extant manuscripts due to geography and political influence), but further North it never took hold. And north of the Borders Northumbrian continued to evolve on its own, eventually becoming Scots. (BTW, the adoption of "official" English is conventionally dated to 1362 and the enactment of the Statute of Pleadings; but of course Edward III wasn't a Norman at all. That line had died out two centuries before).
If you say something in English in a foreign country and the locals don’t understand, just repeat it louder and more slowly and that should do the trick.
A family member who speaks perfect (basically native) Portuguese spent a few months in Brazil. During his stay he noticed that, despite speaking very clearly and accurately, the locals would seem to not understand him correctly. Something was not right, so he used the help of his travelling companion (who is a native Brazilian) to test a theory. From then, whenever they introduced themselves to new people, he introduced himself as a native Brazilian and his (native) friend as a foreigner visiting. Suddenly the locals had no problems with him and started pretending that they couldn't understand the companion! Cheers
I stand corrected, yeah almost no one. The hotel staff spoke English in Spain and some tour guides. Trying to purchase goods from shops though! One store I actually placed what I wanted to buy on the counter but the staff were reluctant to sell it to me, saying no English, no English.
The joke was that, assuming you were using translation tools yourself to translate the sentence the word was included in, it would have to be a somewhat wild sentence to begin with. Admittedly I did misread the translation as 'pancake terror' which would have been much funnier.
Ah. Ok. The thing is, I wasn't using any software, I'm just a milhist buff who knows a little German.
That's true of course about Bede but even before the Anglo-Saxon invasion the Angles, Jutes, Saxons all shared a common language coming over from Holland (Friesland). From what I have read Anglo-Saxon was understandable all over Britain but yes there were regional dialects just like their is today. Language was not as formal either as it is today but their was a common basic language for the Anglo-Saxons. I remember going to Boulogne as a youth where they helpfully put all the prices on shop windows in English but as soon as you went inside apparently no-one has heard of the English language at all.
I took two German-language courses when I was in university...er... college. So when I was in western Germany about 15 years ago, I tried to speak German when out and about. (With friends I spoke English, as I wanted to talk about topics that were beyond the transactional.) Once anyone got a hint that I knew English, they immediately switched to English - they didn't want to bother with someone who had only a rudimentary command of their native tongue. In the east, it was different. I honestly doubt many even knew English there. (One fellow told me many knew a bit of Russian, but no English.) All of my interactions (hotel, train station, etc.) were in my elementary German. Many people were patient and even tried to offer help with the language. It was especially difficult booking a bunk in a 2-person, class B room on a domestic City Night Line Doppelstock Schlafwagen. I think the lady was being really kind, seeing as how I was struggling with these technical railroad terms. She said she'd book me in a single bunk in a 2-man room, but would block it off so that I wouldn't have a companion down the line. Apparently the train had a lot of space. My wife (who speaks French fluently) has traveled extensively in France. She says that many French who know English quite well like to pretend that they're completely ignorant of the language when in the presence of a foreigner speaking English.
On a serious matter I am so jealous of the people who have such perfect lives that the spelling of the word "centre" is the only thing they have to worry about in their lives.
Assuming everyone has their pitchforks at the ready for the ‘customize your collection’ description under the Creators Club…
The one thing that annoys me the most on the forum ( and this is not US or UK specific ) is the incorrect use of the words " of " and " have ", as in " I wish DTG would of included " instead of the correct form " I wish DTG would have included. I'm sure we all have our linguistic quibbles, and this is one of mine.
All because of people mishearing the abbreviation "could've". Also a current switch to past simple tense such as "stood" where "standing" should be used, e.g. "Now you're stood here talking" instead of "Now you're standing here talking". But at this point the forum has derailed into irrelevancy, so I'll leave my peeves at the door on the way out...
