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Are American true native speakers of English?
>> Most Americans I know speak Hungarian when no one is watching. <<
Shh! That's supposed to be a secret. We just pretend to be an English speaking country.
I'm an American. To answer your question, yes. Brits, Canadians, and Australians all sound like native English speakers to me... just with a different accent.
American English isn't even a different dialect of English. It's regular plain old English, the same that's used in Britain. It just has a few different words and spellings... not a big deal. An American can read, say, a 17th century legal opinion written from the Kings Bench as readily as the New York Times, granted they had some passing familiarity with the common law.
The biggest difference is the cultural differences between America and England which result in different ways of approaching communication _in general_ (as in, it wouldn't 't matter what language anyone was speaking, those differences would still be there).
As far as America being born out of England, look at our past presidents: 95% of them are of English decent. Our legal system, Anglo-Saxon social values, and free market system came from England, etc. etc. etc.
Fine, most Americans don't have any English blood, but England is still seen as being some legitimate source of power in the historical sense ... hence, why the most powerful and established Americans are "WASPS", and why only a few presidents were not of English decent (the others were Dutch, the other old money American power, and two wild cards: Kennedy and Osama Obama).
Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that majority of the British settlers weren't English but Irish, Cornish (Mining) and Welsh aswell as English.
Well, much as you may be appalled, we consider all those to be pretty minor variations on the (cough) same theme.....;)
<<Well, much as you may be appalled, we consider all those to be pretty minor variations on the (cough) same theme.....;) >>
I know you do all too well, which is why I made the point of stressing some other British nations within the British isles!! ;) I don't know why England is the most famous anyway, it's the least economicaly stable. It doesn't have a parliament, the others do. It doesn't have its own laws, the others do.
>><<Well, much as you may be appalled, we consider all those to be pretty minor variations on the (cough) same theme.....;) >>
I know you do all too well, which is why I made the point of stressing some other British nations within the British isles!! ;) I don't know why England is the most famous anyway, it's the least economicaly stable. It doesn't have a parliament, the others do. It doesn't have its own laws, the others do.<< Yes, but that is only a matter of recent history or pure legality. For the longest time it has been the strongest state within the British Isles, and then after the formation of Great Britain, the dominant unit within such, in practice.
We use English as the generic term, and Cornish, Welsh, etc. as subgroups. Not strictly accurate, of course, but if you've ever wondered why you're all just English to us, that's why. We think of Cornwall, Wales, etc. as regions, not separate countries. We would unconsciously equate them more with our Midwest, East Coast, New England, South, etc. than with a separate political entity like Canada or Mexico. (And it's your own fault for being so needlessly complicated! ;P)
Scotland and Ireland get a little more respect as separate entities, probably because most of us are used to those being considered separate ethnicities in people's family histories -- people will say that they have some English and Irish on their mother's side, or whatever, and then there is the whole Scotch-Irish tradition in the South and in Appalachia. But Scottish, Irish, and English are still considered very closely related ethnicities -- far more so than Polish to French. We never had a whole lot of Cornish and Welsh communities that kept a separate identity, so we don't pay much attention to them as discrete entities -- although you will see place names like Moon Twp and Bryn Mawr on the US map, so there were some. I think they just got lumped in faster than the Scottish and Irish immigrants.
Thankyou Uriel :)
That's an explanation I've been loking for for a long time. It is true that the Welsh and Cornish had more of a lating influence in Southern America and Australia rather than the US. There is a lot of influence for both nations there. Do you guys know about the offence it causes though? Is it apparent that whether you consider those nations a part of England (which is no more and no less a nation than the others) that the people living in them do not? It would be like me refering to you all as Canadian.
>> It would be like me refering to you all as Canadian. <<
It's usually the other way around. Canadians being referred to or lumped in with Americans. And anyway that's probably not the best analogy, as you'd be unlikely to offend an American by calling him a Canadian--especially since a lot of Americans say they're Canadians when travelling to other countries.
Nah. Sorry! I know it annoys the hell out of you guys, but unless you find a total anglophile among us, the average American isn't up on your history enough to grasp what the differences are or why you'd take offense. And the whole idea of having separate nations within a country is clear as mud to us. Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, etc. etc. -- ya gotta understand that to us, that's a mighty large number of names to have referring to such a small place on the map! Pick a name, dammit. Germany and Italy are made up of a number of historically separate principalities and nation-states, too, but today they're still just Germany and Italy. And if someone in Lower Saxony or Cumbria is getting all het up about being lumped in with those Bavarians and Sicilians, hey, it's not our issue. Can't make everyone happy!
It's probably because we don't have any real parallel to that situation to compare it to. Even Southerners are still Americans, despite their efforts to secede during the Civil War, and residents of Quebec are still as Canadian as people in Alberta, despite differences in politics, history AND language. The only truly separate nations within the US are the Indian nations. Their tribal lands and reservations fall only under federal law. They are completely exempt from the laws of the states in which they are geographically located, and can set their own rules. But the residents are still Americans and considered part of America. (I mean sure, the Iroquois insist on issuing their own passports and the Seminole Nation issued their own declaration of war on Germany in WWII, but I don't think most people take that too seriously.) The Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders and Guamanians might be a closer example, but being far-flung territories, they are kind of in a different situation.
>> Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that majority of the British settlers weren't English but Irish, Cornish (Mining) and Welsh aswell as English. <<
According to Wikipedia: "Cornwall...is a county of England..." 'nuff said.
I'm working from home today - lovely! The cat is away....
It's quite correct - the general American lack of knowledge about the history and cultural make-up of the United Kingdom - in fact, vast numbers of them know pretty much next to nothing about anything or anywhere outside of their own national borders, and, furthermore, a fair number know very little about anything or anywhere outside of their individual State boundaries. Europeans generally, so accustomed to travelling back and forth between completely different countries and cultures and Languages, all in very close proximity to each other, and relatively close to other Continents - Asia (Eastern Europe) and Africa (South Western Europe) are often gobsmacked to hear that so many Americans have never been ouside the confines of their own home State...they live their entire lives within these cocoons. That's not too surprising really, especially when you realise that many of these individual American States are larger in size than the entire United Kingdom and several other European countries, some several times over. Compared with the UK, where 87% of people over 18 hold a passport, only a minority of Americans are in the same position (without checking it may even be as low as an incredible 255, perhaps even less and quite honestly that doesn't bother them too much, apparently, as their perceived chronic parochialism is borne out of the fact that their country is so physically huge, is pretty much self contained, a veritable Continent of its own almost, and in European terms is extremely, but happily, isolated from external influences, and separated from them by vast oceans, even though it is bordered to the north and to the south by countries with whom they share a Language in one case, and seemingly love-hate relationship with both, and it's difficult to determine in which direction the flow of hate or the flow of love is the more dominant....probably it's even-Stevens, I don't know. Checking out the British Expats in the United States (and to be fair, elsewhere in this world) is a constant source of information and amusement on reading all the comments made by those expat Brits living out there. Many who went to live in America never realised what a huge cultural shock it would be for them there, not least of all the day to day frustrations (and chuckles) concerning misunderstandings and difficulties encountered in ordinary day to day verbal communication. They realised quite soon that the best way out of that one was to deliberately acquire an American accent, and code of expression, when attempting to make themselves understood in quite simple interaction - even down to asking for a glass of water in a restaurant. I know it sounds bizarre, but according to these expats it really happens. I have to take their written word for it, but I doubt very much that they are all clinical liars or indulging in typical British pisstaking. Their posts are too too frequent and independently random for that to be the case. We Scots have spread ourselves far and wide acrss the globe over the years, but as English has been very much our dominant Language for centuries it is that Language we have taken with us in exactly the same way as our English brethren. Not quite so with the Welsh though...many of them took their Language to parts of the New World, and it seems that they too the Welsh Language with them to places like Pennsylvania - or is it Ohio? Anyway, somewhere around there, but as English had already become well established in North America that signalled the death knell for the imported Welsh Language thereabouts. That was not the case deep down in South America though...in a region of Argentina called Patagonia, and even to this day there is a thoroughly Welsh speaking colony there, and many of the place names are Welsh. The people are bi-lingual - fluent in both Spanish and Welsh. Many of them have little or no knowledge of English at all, and that certainly presents problems for those of them who come to the UK and, of necessity, land at Heathrow Airport, London, England. Perhaps a very small number of the immigration/passport control staff at Heathrow airport are conversant in Spanish, but I would guess that the numbers of them with a working knowledge of Welsh is pretty much zero...unless of course Emlyn from Penrhyndeudraeth or Gareth from Tonyrefail, or any other guys from Wales, are now working at the airport and are on duty at the time. Like us Scot, the Welsh also get about a bit. London (and many other centres in England) has very flouring Scottish and Welsh Societies.....both of them entirely social and cultural, for all Scottish and Welksh "exiles" in the capital city. As far as I know there are no English equivalents in either Scotland or Wales....but they don't really need them, do they? They're big enough to look after themselves. ;-) The Welsh in Patagonia, Argentina: http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/Wales-History/Patagonia.htm |