Language desk
< February 20	<< Jan \| February \| Mar >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

February 21

How did British and American English come to differ?

I read some time ago that British English showed in the influence of the UK's proximity to France whilst American English remained closer to the Latin roots of the words. This page of The Oxford Dictionary says that the American versions are the modified ones. Which language is closer to the original at the point at which they started to diverge? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.215.47.59 (talk) 13:44, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

British English and American English may contain some clues. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:10, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Language change has happened to both of them after they split geographically. Broadly speaking, it isn't strictly correct to say that, in their modern forms, one is more "true", but rather that they both have diverged in different ways. Even that isn't strictly true, even within Britain dialects of English have changed dramatically over the many centuries, and even today you can find WIDE dialectical differences between "British" dialects of English. If we're talking the "standard" dialects of the languages, those are usually taken as Received Pronunciation in the UK and General American in the U.S. and our articles discusses the origin of both of those. Generally, the more a language speaking population comes into contact with other populations, the more its language tends to change over time; geographically isolated communities tend to retain their language in more conservative ways. That's true in the U.S. of dialects like Tidewater English, High Tider English, etc. --Jayron 32 15:23, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Generally well put, but I would quibble that RP and GA are both forms of spoken English, whereas I suspect the OP was talking more about written English. --Trovatore (talk) 22:02, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Orthography follows its own rules which are not necessarily connected to spoken language in any meaningful sense; for example the great vowel shift was not reflected in changes to English spelling, which is why English vowels don't necessarily match continental vowels. It's also why you can get the same language written in different writing systems (i.e. Serbo-Croatian, Norwegian language). --Jayron 32 16:21, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Right, so why did you start talking about spoken language, when it seems rather clear to me that the OP was talking about written language? --Trovatore (talk) 08:05, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Because I am horrible and useless and should never be listened to at all. --Jayron 32 12:48, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Bokmål and Nynorsk differ not just in orthography, but also in grammar and vocabulary -- considerably more so than standard BrE from standard AmE. A similar case would be Taraškievica vs. Narkamauka for the Belarusian language: the two linguistic norms use the same writing system, but differ in orthography, grammar and vocabulary.

There are, however, many genuine cases where the same language is written in different writing systems: e.g. Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Mandarin, Mongolian, Uyghur, Uzbek --217.140.96.140 (talk) 19:45, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Is the OP asking about pronunciation, or merely about spelling? As you say, there is a lot of variety in pronunciations within the English-speaking world. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:52, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The OP's source does not mention Latin at all so I wonder what words they are considering as English is not a Latin-based (Romance) language but a Germanic one. Rmhermen (talk) 16:54, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well sort of. English evolved from Germanic languages, but it has fallen far astray of its roots. As you can see at File:Origins of English PieChart.svg, only about 26% of English vocabulary is of Germanic order. By comparison, 58% comes from Latin or French. So, yeah, historically English is Germanic in its root structure and it's evolutionary history, but by the words it's more Romance. It's quite a bastard, actually. --Jayron 32 20:42, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A wise person once wrote that "English is a fruitcake made with Germanic flour, Romance fruit, and spices from all over the world".--Shirt58 (talk) 09:19, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

He is most likely thinking of the spelling differences and arguments of etymology detailed at American and British English spelling differences. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 19:45, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

At the point when the languages diverged, spelling was just beginning to be standardised (or even standardized). Noah Webster had a big influence on American spelling, but Samuel Johnson continued to be the main influence on British spelling. Changes are still going on, with the "ise" endings now being taught in British schools to simplify British spelling in the same way that Webster simplified American spelling. For most of the differences, both variants of the spelling were found in both countries before they split. Dbfirs 21:38, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

But in the US there was a definite drive to reform and simplify spelling, see Simplified Spelling Board. Alansplodge (talk) 11:35, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

... an early example of an executive order being largely ignored! Dbfirs 11:51, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

... and see English-language spelling reform for earlier attempts. Dbfirs 12:01, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Of course. Turkish used to be written in Arabic script. Since the 1920s it's been written in Roman. Urdu is virtually Hindi but uses Arabic script. 5.150.92.20 (talk) 20:17, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Eh? —Tamfang (talk) 08:58, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See here. Count Iblis (talk) 21:50, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SANE SPELLING!, which, of course needs to be in all caps. As I recall Benjamin Franklin was into some such reform, too. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:16, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See Grammar Girl : Why Are British English and American English Different? :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™.

—Wavelength (talk) 15:49, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

[The Grammar Girl article mentions The King's English, available online at http://www.bartleby.com/116/ and s:The King's English.

—Wavelength (talk) 01:23, 27 February 2017 (UTC)][reply]

America and England fought a war (or two). We defeated Mad King George and as part of the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783), we won the right to the language itself. Britain had to accept the debased "King's English" as consolation, "What! What!" and you've been losing your arrs, your interdentals, and youah competency wiff ve subjunctive evah since. We've pulled your arrs out of ve fiah twice since. We'll see how it goes aftah Bwexit. μηδείς (talk) 22:52, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bad Man

Spurred by the previous question, I found the statement in American English, that "bad man" is a relatively new addition to the language from the Cowboy era. Did we not call them that before the 18th/19th centuries? Rojomoke (talk) 14:23, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think what's meant is the term badman, spelled as one word. The WP disambiguation page on Badman also has "The contemporary term, along with "gunman", for the people now called "gunfighters" or "gunslingers", in the 19th-century American frontier". Here's the ngram of "badman" and "badmen" (1800 - 2000). ---Sluzzelin talk 14:54, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there are any "bad men" in the King James Bible, but plenty who are "evil" or "wicked". Alansplodge (talk) 13:35, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not in the KJB, nope, but you can find things such as "A bad man may make evil to come out of that which is, in itself, good" (The Cottager's monthly visitor, Oxford University, 1823), or "If, however, he admitted him into his friendship as a good man, but he becomes a bad man, or should appear to have become a bad man, is he still to be beloved?" in Thomas Taylor's translation of Aristotle's works (1811), or "for it matters not, whether a worthy man has cheated a bad man, or a bad man a worthy one; nor whether a good or bad man has committed adultery" in another translation of Aristotle's works, A New Translation of the Nichomachean Ethics by one R. Pearson (1819) etc. Or, even older: "Mr. Love has been heard to say, that Ponton is a very bad man" in The Affair of the Warmister [sic] Workhouse Truly Stated... (Oxford University, 1760). I found older examples, from the 17th century too, sorry for not having started there. If requested, I can add them later.

I believe that the pairing "bad man" in the sense of "wicked man" or "evil man" was neither invented in or limited to the American Frontier, just that particular spelling and meaning of "badman" referred to above. ---Sluzzelin talk 14:44, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Alansplodge (talk) 16:20, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

To expand on that — simply describing a man as "bad" (i.e. "bad man" in a sense comparable to "tall man", "jaundiced man", "crazy man", "sleepy man", etc.) isn't a cowboy-context creation, but we have to distinguish that from a concept of "bad man" or "badman", a role analogous to the "gunman" referenced above. On a related note, printed Liberian English seems to have gone a similar route that non-African varieties of English haven't; it's quite common to find youthful males and definitely-not-youthful males described in the Monrovia newspapers as "a youngman" and "an oldman", and the sense appears to be different from "a man who happens to be young" or "...be old". Nyttend (talk) 03:21, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the British press, well behaved adolescents are "young people" while badly behaved ones are "youths". Alansplodge (talk) 16:32, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, so what about "the two Utes" from My Cousin Vinny? --Trovatore (talk) 08:43, 27 February 2017 (UTC) [reply]

All said and done

In Dolly Parton's 9 to 5 (which I'm performing in in a few weeks) one number has the repeated line "When it's all said and done". I've had some difficulty saying this line, because to me the idiom is "When all's said and done". I wondered if this might be an idiosyncrasy of the script, perhaps for metrical reasons; or whether it was a US variant. I've looked in a couple of corpora, and found that in COHA (Corpus of Historical American English) the form with "it" doesn't occur at all until 2000, and is then represented by just 4 instances, against 19 in that decade for the form without "it" (199 over the 200 years of the corpus' range). I looked at the GloWbE corpus, which is drawn from the web, and classified by country of origin; and found that the form with "it" has 427 instances, against 1620 without; and that US sources account for almost half of the former (207), but less than a third of the latter (507).

My conclusion is that this is a recent change in the idiom, and has spread from North America. My guess is that it arose because "all" is no longer recognised as a pronoun in many people's speech. Has anybody got any more solid information about the origin and spread of this change? --ColinFine (talk) 15:33, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I did a rudimentary ngrams analysis here. Sadly, I couldn't use the whole phrase because google limits a phrase to no more than 5 words (and it counts it's as two words), but when I compared "When it's all said" to "When all's said" (which should catch at least some of the trends in the idioms). Hope that helps. Google ngrams is a powerful tool to track written English usage. --Jayron 32 20:37, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also, small changes like that are commonplace in any performance, so I would say it the way that works best for you. Nobody will boo. StuRat (talk) 20:54, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The OED has only one cite for "when it's all said and done", that being from the New York Times Magazine of May 11th 2003: " I have to be an athlete. But when it's all said and done, I'll be a normal father." (I must admit that I hadn't realised this was a recent innovation, and I might well have used the newer form without realising I was mis-quoting.) The earliest cite I can find is from 1916, in "Our Navy, the Standard Publication of the U.S. Navy" Dbfirs 21:05, 21 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"When it's all said and done" sounds more natural to me, and I'm an old Canadian geezer. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:30, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Neither version sounds right to me! I mean, they're both correct English, but what I think of as the normal phrase is "when all is said and done", with no contraction. And adding "when all is said" to the NGram search produces results matching my opinion. (I may also be described as a Canadian geezer, but I have British and American influences.) --76.71.6.254 (talk) 07:52, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In English use of the contraction is optional. So "When all's said and done" and "When all is said and done" are equivalent. 156.61.250.250 (talk) 11:30, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily in idioms - "All is well that ends well" just sounds strange. MChesterMC (talk) 12:16, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The two phrases do not, to my understanding, mean exactly the same thing. The idiom "when all's said and done" implies completion of everything - the answer to "what is said and done?" is "all - everything." By adding the "it" and saying "when it's all said and done" the answer to that question is limited to "it" - whatever that pronoun may be replacing. That leaves the possibility that there remain other things which are not yet said and done. I am not familiar with the song, so cannot say if that subtle difference is intended there, or if it was just a misuse of the familiar idiom. Wymspen (talk) 19:08, 22 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that reading may make sense if there is a possible antecedent of "it", but otherwise it only makes sense to view "it" as basically a dummy pronoun, leaving the meaning the same as the other expressions. --76.71.6.254 (talk) 06:18, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Which is why I say you would need to have the full lyrics to know. Wymspen (talk) 16:23, 23 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The OED has a comprehensive discussion:

l. when all is said and done (and slight varr.): after all, in the long run, nevertheless, on balance.

c 1560 T. INGELEND Disobedient Child sig. A iii, Whan all is saide and all is done, Concernynge all thynges both more and lesse. 1583 B. MELBANCKE Philotimus sig. S iij, It must be as y^e woman will, when all is said & done. a 1785 J. H. STEVENSON Wks. (1795) I. 137 And yet, when all is said and done, This something's nothing but a Pun. 1886 [see RUMOURER]. 1928 M. WILKINSON Edict of Nantes (C.T.S.) 29 When all is said Bâville was responsible for a good deal of cruelty. 1930 'SAPPER' Finger of Fate 162 But when all is said and done, a prospective son-in-law is as important as any letter. 1937 'G. ORWELL' Road to Wigan Pier iv. 73 When all is said and done, the most important thing is that people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties. 1952 M. LASKI Village v. 98 After all, Friday's pay-day when all's said and done. 1981 R. BARNARD Mother's Boys iv. 49, I know. Still, when all's said and done-.
(Unsigned edit at 08:09, February 24, 2017‎ by IP: 80.5.88.48)

... but no cites for "it's all said and done" (which is what the question was about) before 2003. Dbfirs 19:43, 24 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]