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Do the Americans speak English better than the British?
''Maybe. But not as nasalized as the americans or aussies.''
WestCoast American accent are not nasalized... Great Lakes accents are nasalized, Southern accents too.
***British people write better than Americans, that's for sure!***
I'm a Brit (SCottish version) but no...sorry - I don't think that's true - if your meaning is what I take it to be. Just read through some of the internet forums in which there are many American contributors. All in all I think their standard of writing of the English Language is very high, both in content and presentation. So - I cannot agree with your statament.
Whenever I read the Financial Times, I am throughly embarrassed by the facility and wit in which Brits write compared to my nasty, staccato style of writing. I bet above sentence doesn't make much sense. don't feel like correcting it.
I don't know.... I am an American and I make the worse writing crime, at least according to all of my English teachers through school, with my constant habit of writing long long sentences. I try like mad to take one sentence and just make three short sentences out of it, but it feels so wrong. It doesn't feel like my thought is flowing smoothly the way I want it too if I break it apart with periods. : (
Could be worse.
You could break up your short sentences into small paragraphs. Unto themselves. For no apparent. Reason. And eschew subjects while you're at it. Might as well write the way you talk, I think!
I don't see the reason for this world-wide aversion towards long sentences. Like Karen, I'm often accused of this "deadly" crime.
Of course, if you are trying to emulate Cicero in a spoken conversation, you certainly give your partners a hard time, but most people don't speak exactly the way they write.
"Try understanding what a Creole is talking about. "
Yeah, like Geordie.
<<WestCoast American accent are not nasalized.>>
Guess, yes they are, too, from the viewpoint of a UK citizen. Americans speak with a more-closed soft palate, which makes them sound more nasal to UK citizens.
Will the Americans stand to say they speak better English +than the British? The whole truth is it depends on who speaks on both sides of the pond. Are they well educated or just a spool of corner boys? When you are talking about educated speach, don't include written English. That's the mistake most of you make here, and painfully enough, some of you are native speakers. Hey! A well educated Brit speaks with such precision that you would think you are listening to Alice In Wonderland being read to you -- it sounds very refined; free from taboo and too much base, common words like 'get'. However, a well educated American speaks freely and like as if she or he has all the words in the world to use. What I mean here is that a well educated American use more unusual vocabulary than a British. If you listen to him or her you'd almost think they speak other language other than English. That brings a rather odd beauty to the language. You'll love it! There's beauty in variety. So accept those on both sides of the pond. I'm a Nigerian myself.
I'm an American, but I would still say that the lingo and dialects within Britain are very diverse and enriched with character. Speech is a flexible thing, it doesn't have to be entirely accurate or correct provided that it is atleast comprehendable. This debate is silly, at the end of the day, we judge a countries level of english from what we have seen from a goup of people and when an American represents themselves on television or in person we tend to speak at a very monotone, slow pase, almost to the point where we sound retarted. It's ugly and does not compare to the passionate, extasy driven discussions you would see in the House of Commons or even within a conversation amongst British youths.
- American in London - never going back.
American broke off from English hundreds of years ago - they are the beginning of what will eventually turn into 2 completely different languages.
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian all came from one language - Latin. They were 1 language once - now they are 4 different languages. This will one day happen with English and American.
An afternoon or evening spent in the public gallery of the British House of Commons at Westminster is enthralling a lot of the time - it depends on what subject matter they are discussing or how many members are in the Chamber. I mean, a local issue such as the complications arising out of Government funding for a new slurry and sewerage plant in the constituency of the Honorable Member for Wiltshire North is hardly rivetting is it? An opposition reply to the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget Statement or a heated debate on the legalisation of brothels across England could well be a different matter altogether.
The very atmosphere of the Palace of Westminster, inside and out, is exciting, really......the only regret-the glass screen they have had to erect in front of the Public Gallery. Recent acts of misbehaviour by certain people during debates on highly contentious issues, such as that of guys from Justice for Fathers (or Fathers for Justice or whatever they called themselves) angrily chucking bags of purple powder down into the Commons chamber and spoiling Gordon Brown's immaculate suit or the group of equally angry lesbians who abseiled down from the Gallery to land among the startled MPs sitting on those green benches below. As we discuss accents much of the time in this Forum, then an across the board well attended debate on any important issue affecting the UK as a whole can be very interesting if only from the point of view of all the different regional accents you will hear. For instance, the plummy posh tones from an Member of Parliament (MP) representing a highly affluent constituency in the stockbroker belt of rural Surrey, in the South East of England, or the harsh, gritty, flat vowels emanating from the MP for a seat in South Yorkshire, North of England, or the lilting sing song voice from a highly vocal Member for some predominantly agricultural constituency in Mid Wales, or that of my own home MP from a constituency in the mostly residential western suburbs of Edinburgh, whose softly flowing accent is so clearly that of this part of Scotland. Prejudices can unwittingly come into play here, even listening to all our Parliamentary representatives hammering things out together in the House of Commons. The MP from Surrey, with his/her posh upper class type manner and accent, can, if you are not careful, make you think he/she is automatically more "intelligent" and "better educated" than the man/woman from South Yorkshire, with his/her far more blunt and straightforward way of speaking English, with its short flat "A's" and everything else that identifies accents from that part of the country. Look up their profiles in any reference book and you will see that the harshly spoken Yorkshire MP with the flat Northern English English vowels may well be more highly qualified academically than the posh MP from leafy Surrey with the rounded vowels and soft Southern English refined RP English English. It's so easy to misjudge people solely from the way they speak - unless of course it's quite clear that it's justified.
>>American broke off from English hundreds of years ago - they are the beginning of what will eventually turn into 2 completely different languages.
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian all came from one language - Latin. They were 1 language once - now they are 4 different languages. This will one day happen with English and American.<< The matter, though, is that while the breakup of English as a whole is inevitable (even though it will take centuries to be complete), the distance between English dialects does not necessarily work the way you imply. For instance, General American and Received Pronunciation are actually much closer to each other than many North American English dialects or English English dialects are to each other. Similarly, I myself can *very* easily understand RP, Estuary English, and Standard Scottish English, while I often find the AAVE spoken in my own city to be only barely intelligible, despite the latter falling within North American English and the others falling outside it. And likewise, your average English person is likely to find General American much more understandable than the likes of Geordie, despite Geordie's being part of English English and General American's being part of North American English. (Of course, this kind of thing does not just apply to English - one very good example is in continental North Germanic, where all the standard languages, Standard Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, and Standard Danish are crossintelligible, and for all practical purposes are identical except for the phonological innovations present in Standard Danish and other relatively minor differences; at the same time there exists North Germanic dialects such as Dalecarlian, where while nominally part of Swedish is actually about as far from Standard Swedish as, say, Faroese, so that the other standard languages are much closer to Standard Swedish than it.)
Travis is not entirely correct. The languages are not cross-intelligible or identical. Standard Danish has a completely different sound to Standard Norwegian. I originate from the Kola Pennisula and I don't understand most of these languages.
I can speak some Standard Norwegian and Finnish but I mostly speak my native Saami language (and English, of course). |