Re: [OT] British vs. American English (was Re: Wow, Evolution left me with eggs in my face)
On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 20:51:14 -0400 (EDT), Weaver <weaver@riseup.net> wrote:
>
> It's all rather simple really!
> English is a language and 'American English' is a dialect.
Whether "American English" is a language or a dialect is not
the point. The point is that the same words sometimes mean
different things to different people groups.
>
> Dialects, from time to time, have a way of becoming possessed of
> delusions of grandeur and, believing that there is an opportunity for
> world domination, create initiatives such as making it the default for
> Operating System installations and ongoing processing.
That's ridiculous. Americans are sometimes perceived as being
arrogant by non-Americans (and unfortunately, sometimes justifiably
so), but this has nothing to do with "world domination".
*Something* has to be the default. Naturally, everyone would like
their own language to be the default, but that's not possible.
Since the vast majority of the people who started the Debian project,
including the founders, DEBra and IAN Murdock, were Americans,
naturally they chose American English as the default. It made
sense.
--
.''`. Stephen Powell
: :' :
`. `'`
`-
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