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Entry tags:
Linguistics
I'm compiling an American-to-British phrasebook (because reasons Sherlock). You can find decent dictionaries online (nappy, lorry, etc., etc.) but I'm not so much finding speech patterns -- word choices, syntax, where an American says 'on' and a Brit says 'in,' that kind of thing.
Oddly enough, most of what I've got here (that didn't come from Arctic Monkeys songs) came to my attention because I'd be reading a story in a fandom with an American canon, and I'd hit a phrase that made me go, "This author must be British." (The drawback of this is that some of it might be Australian or something.)
Anybody want to offer input? Here's what I've got (American on the left, British on the right).
Brits use a lot of 'got,' but I can't quite formulate a rule.
to see if you had my number -----> to see if you'd got my number
(also Americans say 'gotten')
Brits don't like to let helping verbs hang out alone.
"You'd eat a horse." "I have." ---> "You'd eat a horse." "I have done."
"That joke gets old." "It must." ---> "That joke gets old." "It must do."
The two dialects handle prepositions differently.
"in the hospital" ---> "in hospital"
"lives on Baker Street" ---> "lives in Baker Street"
Different vocabulary.
"we went to college together" ---> "we went to uni together"
"toss it" or "throw it away" ---> "bin it"
There are a number of things that Brits treat as plural that Americans treat as singular.
"the band wasn't very good" ---> "the band weren't very good"
"I'm no good at math" ---> "I'm rubbish at maths"
"the jury wasn't paying attention" ---> "the jury weren't paying attention"
Oddly enough, most of what I've got here (that didn't come from Arctic Monkeys songs) came to my attention because I'd be reading a story in a fandom with an American canon, and I'd hit a phrase that made me go, "This author must be British." (The drawback of this is that some of it might be Australian or something.)
Anybody want to offer input? Here's what I've got (American on the left, British on the right).
Brits use a lot of 'got,' but I can't quite formulate a rule.
to see if you had my number -----> to see if you'd got my number
(also Americans say 'gotten')
Brits don't like to let helping verbs hang out alone.
"You'd eat a horse." "I have." ---> "You'd eat a horse." "I have done."
"That joke gets old." "It must." ---> "That joke gets old." "It must do."
The two dialects handle prepositions differently.
"in the hospital" ---> "in hospital"
"lives on Baker Street" ---> "lives in Baker Street"
Different vocabulary.
"we went to college together" ---> "we went to uni together"
"toss it" or "throw it away" ---> "bin it"
There are a number of things that Brits treat as plural that Americans treat as singular.
"the band wasn't very good" ---> "the band weren't very good"
"I'm no good at math" ---> "I'm rubbish at maths"
"the jury wasn't paying attention" ---> "the jury weren't paying attention"
no subject
I am not and have never been a syntactician, but your helping verb thing seems to me to be a pretty straightforward US/UK difference in verb phrase ellipsis -- I have never actually read an analysis of it, but clearly the UK version licenses some form of "do" in addition to the gap. Alas, everyone I can think of who still works on VPE (and thus would be likely to have some papers on the internet) is American and probably doesn't write about BrE; the most I found was this paper, which is mostly about a different phenomenon anyway. And I can't find anything that is for non-specialists.
(I realize now that this is probably not the question you were asking.)
no subject