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Somehow the BCcomputer got it wrong, Twins is an ongoing story to be posted in three parts due to length. The second and third parts deal with the hormone issue and the story is complete. When I recieve the edited parts back from my editor I'll post them.
My editor is doing a wondeful jod and want to thank Di Wonder for all the work she's doing with this story. She's a Brit so it makes the job that much harder for her. Thanks again Di, Arecee
Comments
Brit vs US spellings and popular slang are very differrent
Time and distance for one AND that the US deliberately AMERICANIZED much of our spelling back in the 1830s or so to break from the former colonial mother country.
The orginal Webster of Webster's Dictionary was amajor force behind this.
Internet,radio, TV films and all are weaking the differences but they are still there.
GREAT to hear this is just one of three postings.
Her tale deserves completion. But as I commented this was an excellent place to break it for now.
John in Wauwatosa
John in Wauwatosa
Thanks John
When I made the breaks they worked out to around twenty thousand words each and were made at the right places. Arecee
As far as different spellings go...
As far as different spellings go, in regard to the American vs English spellings (not always British), of things like -ize/-ise, -or/-our, and -er/-re endings, it wasn't the Americans who changed them but the Victorian English in some cases and in others, the two spellings just got accidentally regularized/regularised differently on opposite sides of the pond. For truly schizophrenic spelling decisions, try to figure out why the Canadians made the choices they made in some cases. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Hey I resemble that remark!
I'm Canadian.
I would actually prefer to throw out English spelling in ALL of its forms and introduce a new alphabet of approximately 43 characters that are truly phonetic with no repetitions or ambiguities. -Such as the letter "c" which is either "s" or "k" depending on the context. "Ay" and "ah" would each have their own symbol. "Uh" as in "the" or "gut" would always have the same symbol. It would take some getting used to but in the end it would GREATLY simplify everything.
with love,
Hope
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
but ...
... my pronunciation of 'the' and 'gut' bear no resemblance to each other. Phonetic spelling is great until you have to face the problem of exactly whose pronunciation the phonetic sounds should represent. In the UK there would be the thorny problem of the short and long 'a' (grass or grarss) and the long or short 'u' ( 'drinking cup' or 'drinking cap'). The 'oo' sound varies greatly, as well. The old men of my youth in Nottinghamshire coalfield would pronounce 'book' with the 'oo' as in 'moon' for instance.
Accent and dialect in the UK can change dramatically within a very short distance, even as few as a dozen miles and certainly in as many as forty.
Robi
Robi Isn't Exaggerating
In Newcastle-upon-Tyne they refer to their home city as Nyer-cassel. Here in Sunderland, all of twelve miles away, it's New-cassel. (When they're being polite.) In London's East End it would be pronounced Noo-carsul.
Sunderland, by the way, is 'Sun-lun'.
As for Hartlepool, BBC Look North presenter Mike Neville invariably pronounced it 'Hart-luh-pool'. Anyone I grew up with could have told him it's 'Ahd-lee-pewl'.
Middlesbrough can be 'Middles-bruh', 'Middles-bro' or 'Middles-borrer', depending upon which part of the town you're from.
My favourite story comes from Cornwall, where Prince Charles was due to pay a visit some years ago. His first port of call was Launceston, a small market town close to the border with Devon, and in anticipation of his arrival a BBC radio crew decided to talk to some of the locals in one of the town's pubs. "Is it pronounced 'Lorn-sess-ton' or 'Lorns-ton'?" asked the interviewer. "Lan-sun," came the reply.
I suspect he might have received a different answer from the other end of the High Street.
Okay, here's a challenge. Anyone NOT from Norfolk care to guess how the locals pronounce 'Wymondham'?
Windom
As in William Windom. :)
There's an American last name spelled Taliafero, goes back to the Revolutionary War and an Italian count who fought on the American side. It's pronounced Tolliver (actually, Tollivuh because most Southerners don't pronounce final r's and it is a Southern family name). :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
It is,
But perhaps I don't count because, although I'm not from Norfolk, I did live there for a year :)
There's also a Wymondham in Leicestershire (now pronounce that, too :) ) which I think is pronounced differently again by locals.
Robi
Too Easy
You're dead right.
I'll raise the stakes. 'Okeford Fitzpaine', near Shaftesbury in Dorset. And no googling!
There was also a well-known
There was also a well-known Confederate general Taliaferro...who served under Stonewall Jackson. I remember in my AP US History class having a "yankee" teacher refer to him as General Tal-e-a-fairo. In fact she got upset at me when I corrected her with Tolliver (and yes I did say it Tollivuh). :P
Samirah M. Johnstone
What about Houston?
Generally the city in Texas is pronounced Hewston or maybe Whoston but the street in Manhattan is Howston, then there are the various pronunciations of Buena.
Oh and in and around London there is Streatham, Feltham, Bisham, Chesham, Witham, in each case the end sound is ham yet it's quite common to hear them said as tham or sham (however there is a river Witham that runs through Lincoln and that is known as the With-am)
-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.
Or Southwick...
Southwick in Sussex is pronounced 'South-wick'. The village in Hampshire is pronounced 'Suth-ick'. There's a district in Sunderland that's 'South-wick' to most people but 'Suddick' to a select few who live in the Castletown area.
Then there's Houghton-le-Spring. You can call it 'Hawton', 'Hoeton' or 'Howton' and no one contradicts you.
And how did Portsmouth come to be nicknamed Pompey? Nobody has a clue.
It depends on where you grew
It depends on where you grew up around the area.
In some, it's 'hah-yew-ston', others it's 'hee-yew-ston', .. Mostly it's the latter, but the 'he' is VERY short. If you're from Lufkin (Luh-f-kee-in), it's the former. Syllables tend to get emphasized a bit differently as well.
Fun fact. There's a town and a street both spelled the same, but pronounced differently. The town outside of Austin is 'Elgin'. (hard g). The street in Houston is 'Elgin'. (soft g as in 'gin')
Fuqua is a street that nobody can make up their mind how to pronounce, and 'Kuykendahl' is pronounced with extra consonants (but not by the family). 'Kirkindoll'
The road I grew up on I won't list (PM me if you're interested), but we've always told people "If you can't pronounce it, it's spelled correctly"
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I have the simplest possible answer to the whole dialect issue
Everyone in the world would quite naturally HAVE to conform to MY pronounciation.
with love,
Hope
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
Then we'd just have to put
Then we'd just have to put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
No ... But
You WOULD have have to say "shedule" instead of "skedule and "seeg" instead of "segway".
with love,
Hope
Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.
How true.
I'm currently involved with a Canadian writer on a very long story which won't be posted until it's finished and I've noticed the half way house Canadian spelling seem to be. It's great fun but they still seem to insist on the ugly (to my eyes) 'normalcy' rather than the much preferred (by me) 'normality'.
The 'ise' versus 'ize' endings are certainly odd. The latter is extremely rare in modern English English but quite common in early 19th century literature (eg Jane Austen). However, on details like that I always defer to the grammar/spelling version the writer prefers as seems the decent thing to do.
Sentence construction also varies and I often find sentences that read awkwardly to me whilst, at the same time, being perfectly understandable. And that's not only split infinitives :) Ending sentences with prepositions often works despite the 'rule' but I still find some of the most unreadable ones end like that so it's best avoided where possible.
I suppose accurate grammar isn't always really critical in fiction but when writing software all hell breaks loose with a misplaced # :)
Robi
Normalcy and normality aren't
Normalcy and normality aren't quite the same word. They're very close, and probably are used interchangably by many people, but they really aren't the same word.
As for adding letters, here's an old joke, somewhat modernised.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.html
Also, a small article on spelling reform, and why it isn't likely to happen for English.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/09/english_spell...
---
That said, our spelling _has_ been reformed several times. Just look at Chaucerian/Middle English, and compare it to today. Shakespeare had a huge impact as well.
Just keep in mind that while spelling and word choice have changed, grammar and punctuation, for the most part, has not.
(P.S. While Harding shows up as using 'normalcy', and is sometimes pointed at creating it, it's older than that. Here's a pointer to some additional information - http://www.dailywritingtips.com/normality-and-normalcy/ )
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
At least amongst my
At least amongst my generation, that's pretty easily explained. We're taught to spell things in a mostly British way except for the -ize endings, which we go with the Americans on.
Mostly, I think our hodgepodge nature extends from the fact that we tried to keep to our British roots, but being on the U.S. doorstep, American culture tended to override it. In Western Canada, most of the early immigration was from Americans, so that probably affected the way they spell out there.
Certainly most spellcheckers in Canada default to U.S. spelling. That's why you'll see so many Canadians spelling 'center, color, and favor' instead of 'centre, colour, favour'. It also doesn't help that the majority of writing people see are from American video games, TV shows, and the like.
Many of my friends picked up the U.S. spellings of armor, color, defense, from Magic the Gathering and World of Warcraft. I find it a bit sad, to be honest. I like our uniquely weird spelling. A Canadian can switch between American and British in the same sentence. For instance, "I'm going to manoeuvre my car next to the curb." :D
Oh well, that's the nature of life. Languages grow and change. The only changes I can't stand are spelling through as thru and forgetting that there's a difference between ensuring and insuring.
The miss-selected spelling that gets me the most is...
The miss-selected spelling that gets me the most is the word THERE. You have THERE, THEIR, THEY'RE etc, all of which have very different meanings and uses.
I've become so accustomed over the years of reading stories on the internet, where authors are using 'American' English and 'British' English or sometimes even a mix of the two, that it rarely bothers me which type of English is being used. But there are a large number of authors who do not seem to know how to spell this word depending on the context in which they are using it. Sometimes it is very clear that the author does not use English as their first language and, for them, I'm more than willing to make allowances. I, myself do not speak or read any other language so I admire anyone who is not only willing to try writing in a foreign language but also has the courage to publish their efforts for the world to see. After all English is a very complex language which even native speakers often get wrong. However, there are a significant number of authors who hail from countries that use English as their main language who, not only still get it wrong, but often use wildly different spellings in the same context throughout their stories.
I'm sorry if I am upsetting anyone over this, and I'm deliberately not pointing a finger at anyone in particular, but this just bugs me so much that I often make a copy of a story that I particularly like, and therefore read often, in order to run an edit to correct these, to me, glaring errors as I often find the constant misuse of this word an irritating distraction to my enjoyment of what is otherwise a GOOD story. Of course, when I'm editing, for my own use only, I also correct things to 'English' English spellings but the British/American spelling differences alone are not enough to get me to make the effort to re-edit a story.
John.
No computer
If someone posts a very long post with no "continued" or other indication at the end, the assumption of the BC editors is likely to make is that this is a solo post. In this case, the editor was me. :)
However, please don't include the author name in the title box, BC has three other ways to indicate the author and it is neither necessary nor desirable to include the author in the title.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Thanks
Thank you for fixing it for me, Arecee
Why English has perculiar spelling.
Basically, English originates from north European Germanic languages like Saxon, Mercian, Fresian and of course Angles.
If one examines the old Germanic alphabets one will find several extra vowel symbols that don't appear in modern English because modern English uses the Latin alphabet. There is a dearth of vowel symbols in Latin so consequently the 'Busy Vowel' syndrome has emerged in latter day English where vowels have to double up their functions. The letter 'a' serves as 'ay' in 'Say' or 'at' in hat; the letter 'o' serves as 'ow' as in hope, or 'ot' as in hot, furthermore the vowel 'o' can be doubled up to create the 'w' sound as in hoot or soot.
What's worse is that the letter e has not only to double up it's sounds but is has to be used as a modifier to change other vowels.
The whole mish-mash of variable spelling rules has been a series of futile historic efforts to address the phonetic shortcomings of Latin when addressing North European sounds.
It's the history of English and it makes for interesting readings.
So should we do something about it? I suspect the internationalisation of English will become a 'force majeur' for change and future necessities will compel English to address the alphabetical shortcomings of Latin.
That's my two penneth or is that two bits worth. bevs.
Wowie ....
What a big one you have, Arecee (this thread I'm talking about!)
Down in one particular area in Kent, (from where I hail) we have three famous village names for pronouncing problems, plus a few others that take a little work.
We also have a few quaint names.
Here are just a few village names ......
a) Badger's Mount
b) Green Street Green
c) Pratt's Bottom
Now for saying the names - let's start with an easy one:
a) Mereworth ----- this is pronounced Merry-worth
b) Meopham ------- Mepp-em
c) Ightham ------- Item
and finally one, the answer to which I will leave a few hours
d) Trottiscliffe
I know this one .....
It's pronounced Troze (to rhyme with toes) lee. Trozely.
Just down the road from Wrotham (pronounced Root-em)
Here in the South,
we have created the you all contraction y'all.
May Your Light Forever Shine
Southern Plurals
And what about ye'uns? Is that singular, or plural? Is y'all singular or plural?
In reality, they are both singular, so what is the plural of these two?
It is simple, just add the word 'all' in FRONT of singular word which appears to be plural.
Thus, 'y'all' is singular, and 'all y'all' is the plural. It is the same with ye'uns. 'Ye'uns' is singular, and
'all ye'uns' is the plural.
Don't let someone else talk you out of your dreams. How can we have dreams come true, if we have no dreams?
Katrina Gayle "Stormy" Storm
It's actually you'ns. As in
It's actually you'ns. As in 'you and yours'. f
What I like to point out is that English, unlike most Romance languages, has no formal/information plural/singular forms. But it _used_ to.
Thee and Thine was singular. You and Yours was plural. Other than in some Mennonite communities, the singular has fallen out of favour other than in certain religious documents.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Ye, you, and your(s)
Ye, you, and your(s) could be plural but it also acted as a formal singular. Mostly to address your betters. Thee, thou, and thine were the informal singulars, though.
Y'all is plural in Arkansas
At least in the Ozarks and Northeast Arkansas, y'all is plural. In West Texas, I discovered that it is also used as the polite form of address for a singular person. I walked into a store and the clerk asked me, "Can I help y'all?" and I looked around to see who had come in with me.
Y'uns is also plural and is different from y'all. Y'all is "you people here in front of me" -- y'uns is "you and your kin and companions who aren't here now". There's also we-all and we'uns and they-all and they'uns, with similar distinctions.
The polite form of you in Arkansas is a matter of careful pronunciation. 'You' said carefully is polite, in casual or familiar speech it often comes out more like yuh or ya or even y'.
If you've ever seen True Grit, either version, most of the people in that movie are speaking in a fair approximation of a West Ozarks dialect, sped up slightly, and without the palatalization of initial stops before long vowels that sounds so odd to furriners. Note how Mattie sounds most of the time when speaking to adults, she's very polite. Note how Rooster is polite only to the judge, women and, ironically, to people he intends to kill. It impresses me every time I see it, they all sound like my grandparents.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.