Fun talk:British English

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Other Englishes

There's also "ad-english" words that are only used in adverts - haunting me now is "proven" (pr-oh-ven) which was definitely archaic but has been supplanting "proved" in (particularly) hair care product ads. Don't know why it gets my goat but: grrrrrr. Over here we also suffer from the mid/trans-Atlantic accent; puts me off the product rather than having teh intended effect. Susan^Purrrrrrr 11:17, 17 January 2008 (EST)

Proven is also part of one of the three Scots judicial outcomes - guilty, not guilty and not proven. Spica 18:12, 17 January 2008 (EST)

I remember reading about that somewhere. "Not proven" is "Not guilty, but don't do it again," right? -Master Bra'tac^Kree! 18:48, 17 January 2008 (EST)

"Other ways of speaking"?--PalMD^{-Did that sound a little harsh?} 18:57, 17 January 2008 (EST)

Think it was a way of sneaking round the double indemnity thing (which has now been remove in UK). Allowed the "felon" to go free but be charged again @ a later date. Susan^Purrrrrrr 19:03, 17 January 2008 (EST)

I think I must take issue with Miss Susan. "Not Proven" remains a part of Scottish law, and the accused presently still has protection from double jeopardy in Scotland.--Bob^{bing up} 04:42, 18 January 2008 (EST)

Mea culpa. Susan^Purrrrrrr 11:04, 18 January 2008 (EST)

Indeed, Bob. In essence, it's a sort of "aye, we ken ye did tha deed, but we hae nae got the evidence to put ya away fur a verrrry lang tyme" sort of thing. It's related to open crimes - Not proven charges can remain open files. Spica 18:21, 18 January 2008 (EST)

Scotland changed its double jeopardy law in 2011 to allow someone previously acquitted of acts of villainy to be retried, albeit with terms and conditions applying. Forms a major part of the plot in Ian Rankin's Saints of the Shadow Bible, which this Unit happens to be re-reading at the moment. The Scotsman did it. Mr Larrington (talk) 01:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Adverts in Britain are often voiced over in a US accent for children's toys and cosmetics. I don't know why. In the US the only ad I saw with a cockney/East London accent was for Geico insurance. In the UK rather soft Scottish accents are often preferred for financial services. People rarely want to buy anything from an Essex or Birmingham accent and West Country accents appear to have moved from being portrayed as stupid to hypomanic- especially Hampshire. My wife -who had recently arrived from Pakistan originally thought that a Glaswegian accent was how homeless alcoholics spoke when drunk. I realise this is quite a sleight upon Glaswegians, but is unintentional as I used to live in Glasgow. Working with homeless alcoholics as it happens... Streona 09:38, 20 January 2008 (EST) Streona 09:35, 20 January 2008 (EST)

Geico is in a British accent here stateside, too. At least, the Geico gecko is. human 11:56, 20 January 2008 (EST)

You should read James Kilpatrick's Writer's Art column, Susan. He specializes in stuff like this. -- Radioactive afikomen ^{Please ignore all my awful pre-2014 comments.} 16:05, 24 January 2008 (EST)

Number of words

We say:

• English is reputed to have the largest vocabulary of any language in the world - although this does rather depend on how you define a "word". This is largely due to the addition of many words based on Latin and French, to what was originally a Germanic language. It is also due to the fact that the English language became dominant at a time when technology was changing so rapidly that countless new words were first coined in the English language.

I take extreme exception to this. It's outstandingly subjective. Apart from the "what is a word" issue there is also the question of how words are counted. How would one count conjugations? Past participles used as adjectives? Species names which are common to all languages? Chemical names? (With these two you can dwarf the number of "normal" words in any language.) Some languages make up words on the fly by combining elements - giving rise to the 400 words of snow (or whatever) in Eskimo languages. How would you count those? Then there is the question of whether a word is actually used - it may exist but be be so obsolete that it isn't used any more. Do we count it or not? Do we count slang? Do we count regional words? Do we count a word if it is used in the UK but not in the US or in all international varieties of English (Including Indian English which has a large selection of incomprehensible words from native languages.) If a word has two spellings is that one word or two? Two past participles like "lighted" and "lit" or "dived" and "dove"?

OK, one could count the words in a dictionary and do it that way - but which dictionary? English dictionaries vary wildly in the words the include. You might say use the OED, but an very large proportion of the words in that are simply dead.

This is one of the things that "everybody knows", but it's very hard to demonstrate. Also I've spoken to quite a few Spanish people who are equally convinced that Spanish has the largest number of words.

The only thing we can really measure is the number of words used by an educated speaker and - guess what - it tends to be the same for most languages.--Bob^{bing up} 16:20, 13 February 2009 (EST)

First, the Eskimos don't have a zillion words for snow, that's an urban myth (New Englanders and skiers do, however!). Second, I think the key to the claim is the combination of English's "willingness" to absorb words from other languages (no Academie Francaise to get in the way...), and the British Empire's reach - exposing the language to so many other language's words. That said, I agree that the claim is a complex one to analyze - cf, your note about the Spanish, the above arguments would fairly well apply there, too (although, the BE was more extensive). Surely linguists have studied this and keep track of roughly how many words are "current" in many languages? On another note, similar to the species/chemical names (especially chemical names), languages like German (as I understand it) essentially have an infinite vocabulary, due to the rules it uses for "assembling" new, longer words out of other words - IOW, in English we would always say "small black dog" - three simple words, whereas in German there could easily (and probably is) be a single word (eine klieneschwartzhunde?). At least the text says "reputed"... Also, regarding the technology thing, if a French-speaking person says "le fax", or "les innertubes", aren't those really also French words now as well? ħuman 17:01, 13 February 2009 (EST)

I know the Eskimos don't have a zillion words for snow - that's my point. It all depends on how you define a word. The way their language works you take what would three words in English "cold wet snow" and their language (technically an agglutinative language) makes one "word" out of it. But it's not "word" in the sense that we would recognise. As you note, German does something similar.

My understanding is that linguists would not make such a bold claim. Indeed, my copy of "The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language" criticizes the claim on the same basis that I have. (And which is probably where I got my objections from some years ago.)

Referring to it briefly, in addition the the points I made they also mention such things as abbreviations, and millions of flowers and insects as causing problems.

Interestingly, they also maintain that it is difficult to even estimate the size of the average person's vocabulary for various reasons. Partly because we have an active and a passive vocabulary and partly because we can often "know" words we have never seen before either because of their context or because they are made up of other parts of words we already know.--Bob^{bing up} 17:28, 13 February 2009 (EST)

While it’s now accepted that the Inuit don't actually have a huge number of words for snow I've read that Yiddish does have a large number of words for “idiot” and Aussie English a similar number of euphemismsfor being sick ;-) Mr Larrington (talk) 01:28, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

No

"Indeed, before the British had the rather strange idea of using "an" to precede any word starting with a vowel, the word "an" meant "if"."

Actually, the original was an, and the n got dropped before consonants, just like how mine hands became my hands, compare German mein. The "if" bit is true, though. 95.14.215.211 (talk)

Trough

In some places near the midwest Canadian border with the US, "trough" is pronounced "troth." Is that the case in any idiom of British English? Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 01:47, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

It normally rhymes with cough over here. Sophie^Wilder 02:00, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Farmers in Scotland traditionally pronounce the gh as guttural. The English seem unable to handle the velar fricative anymore (they call Bach, Baaak) as do some of the people in Edinburgh.-Albannach (talk) 16:22, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Author Iain Banks noted the sudden ability of English TV presenters to pronounce the name of an island country in the Persian Gulf as “Bach-rain” during Gulf War v1.0, when they always referred to Scottish lakes as “locks” Mr Larrington (talk) 01:32, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Pronounciation

... is one means whereby one's class can be determined the instant one open's one mouth (along with U and non-U terms, fish knives and other signs and symbols).

There is also 'raise up' and 'raze to the ground' (and 'to cleave together' and 'cleave assunder'). 82.44.143.26 (talk) 18:07, 24 November 2015 (UTC)