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Fun fact, only about 4% of english speakers are english. I know this article is tongue in cheek, but I like to roll that out when one of my fellow brits goes o
by tomelders 14y ago
Fun fact, only about 4% of english speakers are english.
I know this article is tongue in cheek, but I like to roll that out when one of my fellow brits goes on a rant about american english.
Me personally, I go with the american spellings all the way.
- untog 14y agoAnother fun fact- the "z" spellings are actually the original. After people left for America, all things French became fashionable, including spelling. A favourite of mine to pull out when a fellow Brit is spouting language-hate. (I still use the "s" spellings, though)
- thejosh 14y agoAsk them what the official national language is of England as well. ;-)
- bpatrianakos 14y agoWhat is it? I looked it up hoping to be surprised and all I found was that it's supposedly English (no surprise) and that Polish is now the official second language apparently. Even Wikipedia didn't help. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_Kingdom I'm really curious now, please tell us the answer.
- thejosh 14y agoEngland doesn't have an official language (or maybe it was the UK), neither does the US.
- SEMW 14y agoIANALinguist, but like a lot of 'fun facts', I think that's only half true. Saying the 'z' spellings are invariably the originals is as wrong as saying that for 's' endings. The idea is that the words originally came from ancient Greek, where they had the ending -ιζειν, pronounced with a z. The trouble with that is that not all these words did come from the Greek. E.g. realize/realise was (IIRC) a French invention, and they spelled it réaliser. And even in the ones that did come from the Greek, not all of them had the -ιζειν ending - e.g. analyse/analyze was ἀνα·λύω (pronounced analuo); I guess the French gave it the -yser ending. (The real solution, IMO, is to reject the idea that the 'correct' spelling of a word is the one closer to how it was spelled in the language it was invented in).
- stonemetal 14y agoYes, but don't the Australians and other non English, English speakers tend to use the British spelling vs the American spelling?