D3X73R

This was going to be a post where I tried to cover the many different bird names between US and UK that I've covered on Twitter, but I now reali{s/z}e that I don't have enough blogging hours in a day to do that, so consider this Part One in a series of bird-related posts. This one focus(s)es on (BrE) garden birds —i.e. songbirds and the like. The kind of thing that might nest in a tree, near you. (Note that yardbird is not AmE for garden bird !) Photos are from Wikipedia, unless otherwise stated, and are generally of adult male birds. The naming of birds in North America North America and Europe differ in their native bird species a fair amount, and so there are different birds to name. But when English-speakers first encountered birds in America, they often used familiar words for the unfamiliar species. A great source on AmE/BrE bird-name differences is British Names for American Birds by Cecil H. Brown in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology , vol. 2 (June 1992). If you wa...

I've had requests from Andy J and (long ago) Doug Sundseth to cover this one. Here's an excerpt from Andy's recent email on the topic: I watch a lot of Youtube videos which feature people who self-describe as makers (part DIYers and part semi-professional craftsmen and women). I have noticed that also without exception those based in the USA and Canada pronounce the word solder as sodder , whereas we BrE speakers would invariably sound the L in both the noun and the verb solder . The North American variation seems at odds with the similar phonic construction in soldier or for example folder which, to my ear based on film and TV utterances, seem to be pronounced in a largely similar way to BrE, ie the L is sounded. Before I go into the history of the word, I want to do a little bit of "here's how a linguist thinks".  Andy's got(ten) us started along the right lines here, in that (a) he talks about variation , rather than deviation , and (b) he l...

pic from marshalls.co.uk (AmE) What's up with the spelling kerb ? This is one of those topics that I *thought* I had blogged about. But no! BrE has kerb for the edging alongside a road or path and curb for the 'restraint' verb (as in curb your enthusiasm ). AmE uses curb for both. In general, there are more homophones for which BrE differentiates spellings and AmE doesn't than the other way (a)round . This is not particularly surprising, since spelling differences are generally in the direction of AmE being easier to learn than BrE (that was Noah Webster's first priority in promoting new spellings). But the point I try to highlight when I talk about spelling differences is: most American spellings were not invented in the US. There have always been spelling variations. And that's well illustrated by this case. Spelling the 'edge' noun Kerb is the newer spelling—albeit, still hundreds of years old. The first c- spellings for the noun are from the ...

One of the things I've found most useful during lockdown is to have routines that distinguish the days. The routines have become most distinct on weekends: Saturday is Cleaning Day and No-Laptop Day; Sunday is Blogging Day. After the last topical blog post , I planned to do another topical one this Sunday, regarding a UK government slogan. But then on my no-laptop Saturday, THEY CHANGED THE SLOGAN. They timed it just to make me look untopical. Grrr. Anyhow, here's the graphic that we've been seeing on our televisions for the past seven weeks: And too-many-to-mention people have got(ten) in touch with me to ask whether (or complain that)  stay home is a rather American phrasing for Her Majesty's government. Indeed, it is. Both AmE and BrE can say stay at home , but AmE is very comfortable with the at -less version, while BrE isn't. These GloWBE data are from about 7-8 years ago. Here's what it's looked like in the News on the Web corpus for 2020 so far. S...

A retired colleague contacted me with this query: Has a dialect difference emerged between US novel coronavirus/new coronavirus and UK COVID-19 , do you think? Novel coronavirus/new coronavirus is favoured by Reuters, but I don't know whether that counts in the dialect balance. I hear plenty of COVID-19 from US sources, so that didn't strike me as quite right, but I had a look (on 29 April) at the News on the Web (NOW) corpus , which (so far this year) had 226 covi* (i.e. words starting with covi-) per million words in US and 49 per million in UK. For coronav* it's 362 US v 92 UK. (I searched that way so that I'd get all variations, including COVID without the -19 , without the hyphen, coronaviruses , etc.). Now, I don't trust the geographical coding on the NOW corpus very much, because you have things like the Guardian showing up in the US data because it has a US portal that has US-particular content, but also all the UK content—and that doesn't d...