On Mar 29, 2017, at 2:18 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> It's amazing how isolated pockets of our
cultures can be from each
> other! "Multiple peoples divided by a common language"
On Wed, 29 Mar 2017, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
...
Or the time an English co-worker related the
story surrounding her
initial job interval in the US. She described the stunned look on the
face of the desk clerk at the local Holiday Inn when she asked to be
knocked up at 7:30 the next morning.
British V American/"Colonial"? idioms are not surprising.
What's more surprising are the mutually exclusive variations within a country.
Not at all. Linguists have a term for this: dialects. Actually, that applies anywhere,
country borders are not relevant; it simply means two variations of a language that are
"mutually intellegible". That may be a bit of a judgment call. As a not-native
speaker of English I tend to have trouble with, say, the Welsh dialect of English.
If dialects diverge to the point that they aren't mutually intellegible, a linguist
calls that two languages. So China has lots of languages, not just many dialects.
Conversely, some argue that Norway and Sweden use two dialects of a single language.
paul