Linguistics

[resonant]

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"

Comments

[lobelia321]

Maths is. Sports is. Definitely. But: The pair of shoes are under the bed (people say this and it is, in British English, not grammatically uncorrect).

[china_shop]

There are definitely some collective nouns we routinely treat as plural that are singular in the States: "staff" is the one I notice most often. "The staff is..." sounds wrong to me every time.

I think there's a distinction between "my family is" (acting as a unit, eg, "my family has abstained from Christmas for the last couple of years") and "my family are" (acting as a group of individuals, eg, "my family are all cranks and pedants"), but again, I don't know if that's just a Kiwi-ism.

[resonant]

This reminds me of my whole speech explaining to Northerners how 'y'all' is different from 'all y'all.'