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

[aunty_marion]

Eh, reading comments reminds me of a couple of other things.

The English go shopping, not marketing; marketing means selling, here. And going 'to the market' would usually mean an outdoor (sometimes indoor) collection of small stalls, all selling different things; we'd usually just 'go shopping' or 'go to the shops' or to a specific shop - "I'm just off to Tesco [the butcher/greengrocer/ironmonger], do you need anything?" We don't go to 'the store[s]'; that's mostly only used in conjunction with another word/partial word, e.g. 'superstore' (huge supermarket), or 'department store' (such as Selfridges).

Another one is the propensity of some authors to leave 'Street', 'Road', etc off street names - far too often Harry Potter heads for Diagon. Nope, Diagon Alley, full name, please! Oxford? Oxford the town, Oxford Street, Oxford Circus? At the junction of Baker and Oxford... What? I live on (yes, it is 'on') Hargrave Park. Not Hargrave Road, which is up the main road a bit on the other side, and definitely not on Hargrave. Also, we don't generally have 'blocks'. From one street junction to another can cross a different number of roads on each side of the main road one is travelling along! For instance, to get from the bottom of my road to the junction of Holloway Road and Junction Road crosses my street and two others on this side; on the other side it crosses two. And not in the same places as the ones on this side, either.

[resonant]

These are useful, but I don't think Americans go marketing, either, so whose word is it?

I've heard "go to market," but only from my country relatives. We would "go grocery shopping" or "go to the grocery," if we didn't use the specific store name. One of the supermarkets here tried for a while to get everyone to accept "go Krogering" as a verb form, but it sounds obscene.

[aunty_marion]

I think the way I've heard/seen it is 'going to do the marketing' and 'going to the market'. I suppose it might be more region-specific? (In knitting, there are a lot of patterns for 'market bags', which also sounds odd. Some of them are what I'd call 'string bags' - the more open mesh-like ones, otherwise they're just tote bags or shopping bags, to me.)