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[Pattern-chaser]

I think it is time to recognise American and English as separate languages. We all know that American grew out of English, but it left home a while ago now, and is doing very well by itself.

This topic asks if it is sensible and reasonable to treat American and English as two separate (but related) languages?



[I have more to say on the subject, but first let's see if there is any interest in discussing this...]

[LuckyR]

We're all aware of certain vocabulary differences (though some would consider the alternatives similar to regional American differences in the sense most folks know both meanings such that communication is unaffected). And of course there are pronunciation differences. Are there many grammatical differences?

[Pattern-chaser]

I don't think there are significant grammatical differences. There are some different ways of expressing things that encroach onto grammar, I think, but they are not really significant. Yet. The evolution of any language is a chronic thing, and it will progress in its own chosen direction, whatever that turns out to be.

The most visible difference, IMO, is the simplification of American spelling. On the one hand, it makes spelling easier to learn. But in English, many words carry their history with them, in their spelling. You can, for example, look at them, and see from the weird letter-combinations that this word came from French, rather than (Anglo-Saxon) German. This, in turn, is very helpful in puzzling out the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

[Sy Borg]

I blame Webster. If you are going to change a language to be more practical, then why this?

realize
realized
realizing
realization
realism

Should have kept the "s" or made the "z" change consistent.

[Pattern-chaser]

Consistency is rarely a feature of real-world human languages, n'est ce pas?

[Sy Borg]

Parlay voo to you too (sound this out with as broad an Aussie accent as possible).

Sure, consistency only exists as an ideal, but why gratuitously change forms that are consistent into inconsistent ones? We know the answer - to affirm a distinctly American way of doing things, rather than follow those dreadful Brits. The US has already had at least one space disaster because of their stubborn clinging to imperial measures. An own goal.

Maybe now that the US is in decline, and other powers are rising in the world, there will be less American exceptionalism and they will finally accept the logic of a metric system? US English has clearly won out over actual English, thanks to their teaching Webster's vandalism to international students, and programming annoying US spellings as a default in spellcheckers and AI. When programming, I'd have to take a breath before typing "color" but the infernal machine does not understand "colour"

[Lagayascienza]

There are lots of inconsistencies in English generally. For example, pronunciation and spelling are a dogs breakfast. They are so inconsistent that we could spell the noun "fish" as "ghoti".

f as in tough
i as in women
sh as in motion

This is thanks to the fact that English is such as mongrel of a language, having taken bits and pieces from so many others - German, French, Latin, Greek, Arabic etc. It has also made English one of the larger languages in terms of individual word-count.

Despite the differences in spelling and pronunciation, American English, British English and all other forms of English, will remain the one language until they are no longer mutually intelligible. It's a bit like how a species remains one until sub-populations differentiate so much that they can no longer interbreed. They then become separate species. English hasn't reached that stage yet. Although I've heard some Scottish brogue that to my ear comes close to being aurally unintelligible. As for spelling, I've become bi-lingual in written English -sometimes I use American and sometimes British spelling, depending on the audience.

[Pattern-chaser]

Maybe now that the US is in decline, and other powers are rising in the world, there will be less American exceptionalism and they will finally accept the logic of a metric system? US English has clearly won out over actual English, thanks to their teaching Webster's vandalism to international students, and programming annoying US spellings as a default in spellcheckers and AI. When programming, I'd have to take a breath before typing "color" but the infernal machine does not understand "colour"

Your sentiments resonate with me. But I don't have a problem with what Americans have done, and are doing, to their own language. It's theirs to mangle as they see fit. Fair enough.

And it's obviously the case, as you say, that the lingua franca of the Western world is American, not English. I regret that a little, but the British Empire is long gone, and (rightly) not remembered fondly. America is the current Imperial power, although they too are fading. And so we all speak American to each other. I try not to; I try to stick to English, just to help me remember what is English and what is American. My own sons can't tell the difference; *that* is genuinely regrettable, IMO. Lose the language, you lose the culture.

As for your final sentence, yes!!! I'm afraid I *do* resent that programming language keywords are American. I probably shouldn't, though.



P.S. The world learned American not from Webster, but from Hollywood films and TV. The spellcheckers don't help either.

[Sy Borg]

And it's obviously the case, as you say, that the lingua franca of the Western world is American, not English. I regret that a little, but the British Empire is long gone, and (rightly) not remembered fondly.

I reckon the British Empire should be remembered fondly. While I find our own cultures are deeply flawed, when compared with everyone else they look great - and the Brits were the only ones to ever ban slavery - after the practice was accepted everywhere else (including by indigenous tribes) for thousands of years. A huge achievement, never acknowledged.

Who in history has been better than the Brits? The Mongols? Ottomans? Stalin? Mao? Idi Amin? None. The Yanks did well for a while but dropped the ball at Vietnam and never picked it up.

In the meantime, with the Belt and Road initiative, I saw video of Chinese bosses whipping unruly African employees, who are pleading not to be struck. Everyone is bad. There is no cause for western self-flagellation while others, who do worse, stay silent about their own sins.

It's a shame IMO that English is turning into American. Does anyone consider American culture a model on which we should base ourselves? It was always somewhat crass, and now it's become a mess.

As for language, I would say we two speak Anglo-American, but with more emphasis on the Anglo side than most.

[Lagayascienza]

All empires do horrible things to those they subjugate. That, at least in part, is the point of being an empire. The Romans, the British, the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish... they all cruelly extracted wealth from those they ruled.

But indigenous people did horrible things to each other prior to invasion and colonization - they were not saintly innocents peacefully inhabiting gardens of Eden in which all were equal and where general happiness reigned. The Incas and the Aztecs ripped out the beating hearts of sacrificial victims. And in PNG, for example, head-hunting and cannibalism were practiced into the 20th C. Which puts me in mind of "What have the Romans ever done for Us" from Monty Python. Colonization wasn't all bad news.

In the 20thC, the short-lived Nazi and Japanese empires were rather nasty and the American empire, now also on the wane, did some rotten things, too. But I doubt that a Chinese empire will be much gentler. Maybe we'll all have to learn Chinese to get ahead and English, British or American, will no longer be the world's lingua franca.

It seems humans can't resist pushing each other around whenever they're able to. We haven't changed and probably won't anytime soon.

[Sy Borg]

Yes, I think the west's self-flagellation has reached a point where it's undermined itself to the point that (relative) freedom around the world is in retreat as more authoritarian eastern nations have greater influence.

If I have to learn Mandarin, it's game over for me. I had enough trouble with French and German at school, let alone learning a 10,000 character alphabet where just tiny differences in a stroke or sound can completely change the meaning.

In that sense, I have sympathy for Webster in trying to remove some of English's "gatekeeping" qualities, but he tried too hard to differentiate US and UK and not hard enough to make the written language more intuitive.

[Lagayascienza]

Yes, I can see the point of Webster's changes. But maybe he should have gone the whole hog and made the spelling more intuitive generally so that, for example, "enough" was spelled "enuf" and "motion" was spelled "moshun". That would have made spelling easier to learn for kids and it would have made English easier to learn as a second language for speakers of other languages which don't use the Latin script.

But it would, on the other hand, have made it harder for speakers of Romance languages such as French and for German speakers, both of whom do use the Latin script and can recognize many words of French and German origin in English as it is currently spelled. I found French fairly easy to learn because it shares so many words with English even if they are pronounced a bit differently in the two languages. I lived in Thailand for a year and tried to learn Thai but found it impossible. The script was beyond me and, like other Asian languages, it is tone language.

If the all world's languages at least adopted the one script and metric measurements, it would make communication and trade and tech transfer easier. But the postmodernist vultures would come down on that like a ton of bricks. Cultural imperialism or some such.

[Pattern-chaser]

And it's obviously the case, as you say, that the lingua franca of the Western world is American, not English. I regret that a little, but the British Empire is long gone, and (rightly) not remembered fondly.

I reckon the British Empire should be remembered fondly. While I find our own cultures are deeply flawed, when compared with everyone else they look great - and the Brits were the only ones to ever ban slavery - after the practice was accepted everywhere else (including by indigenous tribes) for thousands of years. A huge achievement, never acknowledged.

I didn't expect that. My own opinion is that all empires are the same. They take other people's lands, and steal their resources and valuables. They often enslave, or at least coerce, the native population too. The British were no different to the Romans or the Mongols is this respect. Conquest is theft.

It's a shame IMO that English is turning into American. Does anyone consider American culture a model on which we should base ourselves? It was always somewhat crass, and now it's become a mess.

As for language, I would say we two speak Anglo-American, but with more emphasis on the Anglo side than most.

There was a time when I was much younger and even more unwise () than I am today, when I felt that Americans were using their Imperial Iron Fist to debase and demean my language. These days, I am of the opinion that American has left home, and established itself in the world independent of its parent tongue. I think time has flown, as it does, and English and American are now two separate languages, albeit closely related.

I speak English, although I do have some command of American, as most of us do. But I do regret that my sons can't tell the two languages apart. Oh well, c'est la vie! The only real problem with this — as opposed to simple preferences — is that the culture goes alongside the language, and if you lose the latter, you will lose the former too. The Disnification of video entertainment is a good example of this. Our national treasures have been debased, and turned into profit-mules. Consider that well-known philosopher, Winnie the Pooh...

I'm very unsure of how I should feel about this, and what, if anything, I could do to change it. The loss of a whole culture (via loss of language), such as other empires have caused in the past, is a terrible thing, IMO. Any ideas or suggestions?

[Thomyum2]

I think it is time to recognise American and English as separate languages. We all know that American grew out of English, but it left home a while ago now, and is doing very well by itself.

This topic asks if it is sensible and reasonable to treat American and English as two separate (but related) languages?

It's a question that's often discussed in the field of linguistics, actually, more broadly than just the specific differences between two varieties of English: where exactly to draw the line between what constitutes an individual 'language' versus just a 'dialect'. My understanding is that the difference is rather arbitrary, and things often don't fall neatly into one category or the other.

In the example you cite here, there's divergence in some vocabulary, pronunciation and - as you pointed out above regarding spelling of some words - some differences in the written language. Yet both forms of the language remain largely understandable to speakers and readers of each variant. But consider the example of Chinese in which the opposite is true - the written language is the same throughout the population, yet the spoken language is often not mutually comprehensible between speakers of the various forms - Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. Yet these are usually referred to as 'dialects' of Chinese rather than separate languages. On the other hand, speakers of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan and Italian, referred to as distinct 'languages', can often understand each other pretty well in conversation. Of course, all of these languages continue to evolve so it's never a static situation and how we decide to classify them today may not necessarily hold for long.

From a philosophical perspective, I think Wittgenstein's concept of 'family resemblances', which he expanded on in the Philosophical Investigations, is usefully applied here. His idea that (per Wikipedia) "things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things" fits the situation of languages, as well as many of the other categories we use to classify the wide diversity we find in the world, which are often usually generalizations rather than specific criteria that allow us to always fit something cleanly into one or the other. The same idea applies to a concept such as race or ethnicity, for example.

[Sy Borg]

And it's obviously the case, as you say, that the lingua franca of the Western world is American, not English. I regret that a little, but the British Empire is long gone, and (rightly) not remembered fondly.

I reckon the British Empire should be remembered fondly. While I find our own cultures are deeply flawed, when compared with everyone else they look great - and the Brits were the only ones to ever ban slavery - after the practice was accepted everywhere else (including by indigenous tribes) for thousands of years. A huge achievement, never acknowledged.

I didn't expect that. My own opinion is that all empires are the same. They take other people's lands, and steal their resources and valuables. They often enslave, or at least coerce, the native population too. The British were no different to the Romans or the Mongols is this respect. Conquest is theft.

That is presentism, judging as exceptional what almost every hominid society in the world has done routinely for millions of years.

You ignore the nature of reality - that all organisms must kill and/or exploit and.or out-compete other organisms to survive. No choice. If you do no kill and exploit other organisms, you die. As a human, you do exactly the same to other organisms that you accuse empires of doing. are you judging yourself for being an OPPRESSOR human?

Alas, all those lovely, sweet indigenous tribes that western academics treat as "noble savages" killed, raped, conquered and enslaved to an extent that would make mediaeval torturers proud. There is a reason why invaders saw them as "savages". They were violent to an extent that shocked the Europeans.

Don't look for good guys and bad guys. There are none. There are just conflicts of interest and there are power differentials. The rest is academic.

It's a shame IMO that English is turning into American. Does anyone consider American culture a model on which we should base ourselves? It was always somewhat crass, and now it's become a mess.

As for language, I would say we two speak Anglo-American, but with more emphasis on the Anglo side than most.

There was a time when I was much younger and even more unwise (😯) than I am today, when I felt that Americans were using their Imperial Iron Fist to debase and demean my language. These days, I am of the opinion that American has left home, and established itself in the world independent of its parent tongue. I think time has flown, as it does, and English and American are now two separate languages, albeit closely related.

I speak English, although I do have some command of American, as most of us do. But I do regret that my sons can't tell the two languages apart. Oh well, c'est la vie! 😉 The only real problem with this — as opposed to simple preferences — is that the culture goes alongside the language, and if you lose the latter, you will lose the former too. The Disnification of video entertainment is a good example of this. Our national treasures have been debased, and turned into profit-mules. Consider that well-known philosopher, Winnie the Pooh... 😢

I'm very unsure of how I should feel about this, and what, if anything, I could do to change it. The loss of a whole culture (via loss of language), such as other empires have caused in the past, is a terrible thing, IMO. Any ideas or suggestions?

Settle down, they are one language. British English is the original, and American English is its idiot bastard son.

I find that a bigger problem is internationalism. When a language goes global, it is stripped of all the nuances and private jokes that make language fun because no one understands, unless one has a closed audience. I have to constantly edit and re-edit my writing to be understood, and that usually seems futile too.