Mowermech beat me to it. I, too, was taught that the period -- Oh, well, what he said. And that was a very long teach ago. As I read various writings today, I cannot tell whether the rules are changing, or teaching is slipping.
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I noticed that different placing of the punctuation before & after the quotation marks years ago, US & UK, but now I am so mixed up I do not know which one is 'correct'.
And now for a question on American pronunciation that has puzzled me for years. The usual way you pronounce an English county, Devonshire, Nottinghamshire etc to rhyme with 'tire' is like fingernails on a chalkboard, BUT for some strange reason you pronounce the state 'New Hampshire' correctly! why??
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We watch The Graham Norton Show on BBC America and struggle with the accents of some of the guests -- mostly people from Scotland or Wales.
My best friend studied in England for a year and there was a shared phone for several rooms. Whenever someone called that nobody could understand, they knew it was the mother of a certain student and tried to find him for her.
Orion wrote:
2oldman wrote:
Orion wrote: Remember , there is no such thing as talking with NO accent!
Being from WA I've never been told I have an accent, although a Canadian once pointed out that I say "prah-ject" instead of "Proh-ject".
Where I grew up in the UK, the accent used to change every few miles. When I first started working, I would travel through three very distinct accents on my half hour trip to work. I had friends from the city of Birmingham (pronounced properly as 'Birming-um'!) who had two distinct accents as he was from closer in to the city centre where as she was from the outskirts and had a more 'rural' accent. A result of this is that British people of my age have a very sensitive ear to various accents.
When I first came to Canada, I could NOT believe that Canadians and Americans thought that Australians sounded the same as the British! I also couldn't believe that Canadians could not tell the very distinct change, to me anyway, in the accent when we went down into Washington state. My ear used to be so sensitive that I can remember years ago sitting in a bar in Soap Lake and listening to the conversations on two nearby tables. They all had American accents, but the group on one table had heavier accents with a bit of a twang but the other table just sounded American. Turns out on investigation that I could tell the difference between a Washington Coastal & Central Washington accent! One table was local & the other group from Seattle. I can still detect a slight change when we cross the Cascades.
Funnily enough, to my ear, the accent gets less as you travel down the West coast as to me, Californians have 'less' of an accent.
I think that a lot of the differences in place names is more local dialect than "correct" pronunciation. There are towns and names in the south that seem to have their own pronunciations. For instance, Cairo, Georgia is pronounced "Karo". (There's that quotation mark/punctuation mark conflict again!) The town of Buena Vist is "Byoona Vista", Martinez has the accent on the last syllable instead of the second. The surname Houston is pronounced "Howston". These words are not mispronounced in Georgia, but to one from another area, they may sound that they are.
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mowermech wrote: ...IIRC, it depends on whether the quoted word or phrase is the question or not. If it is the question, then the question mark should be before the quotation marks. If it is not the question, then the question mark should be outside the quotation marks. However, I left school a LONG time ago, I could be wrong...
Those are the rules in Brit English which, frankly, I agree with (makes much more sense) but since I live in the U.S., I go by the rules I learned in school here (and since then; my education did not end when I graduated from college). If I was living and/or writing for a Brit audience, I would follow their rules. A great book that unintentionally does an excellent job of pointing out the difference between Brit and Yank flavors of English punctuation is "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss.
mowermech wrote: ...But then, the thread was started about misuse and abuse of WORDS, not punctuation...
You're the one who wanted to get picky over unrelated errors.
mowermech wrote: ...The Canadians and Brits say "aluminium", we say "aluminum". Both are correct...
Unless the Brits and Canadians spell aluminum as aluminium, they are mispronouncing it. They are adding letters and a syllable that aren't there. My complaint with people adding a letter where there is none is that letters that aren't there shouldn't be pronounced. Dropping them is much less of an issue, if an issue at all.
mowermech wrote: ...We say "hood", they say "bonnet". We say "trunk", they say "boot". We say "station wagon", they say "Estate car (or wagon)".
Which way is correct? Seems to me they both are!
It has been said that we invented the automobile (not really true), but THEY invented the language (not really true, either).
In the greater scheme of things, does it really matter? Probably not.
And in Texas, they call the trunk (boot) a turtle. So what? This (and your other examples of names for car terminology) is irrelevant since we are discussing pronunciation, not terminology. As long as trunk, boot, and turtle are pronounced correctly, there is no issue (except for using the wrong term in a given place could cause some embarrassment or offense, such as your solder example).
Overall, most languages devolve instead evolve because people misuse them (such as poor sentence structure, poor punctuation, mispronunciations, poor spelling), mostly due to ignorance and, to a lesser degree, slang spawned by social class separation (such as young people wanting to use terms their stodgy elders won't understand or will be offended by those terms). Some evolution does occur from the adoption of foreign words, new technology, and the retirement of words from outmoded technology but, sadly, devolution prevails.
How are texting, tweeting, and emailing going to affect the words we use and the way we spell them? We have already seen how street slang has affected the language, "What up?" for example.
webecreekin wrote: How are texting, tweeting,... affect the words we use and the way we spell them? .
As long as lol and fwiw are not accepted in school, we'll probably survive. What's scary to me is when people don't KNOW what the real words are..like when somebody types 'prolly' and thinks that's correct.
webecreekin wrote: How are texting, tweeting,... affect the words we use and the way we spell them? .
As long as lol and fwiw are not accepted in school, we'll probably survive. What's scary to me is when people don't KNOW what the real words are..like when somebody types 'prolly' and thinks that's correct.
Teachers I know say they have problems with students trying to use texting shortcuts in their school work.
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