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

[sakana17]

Another one I first came across in fanfiction written by Brits (or Commonwealthers) but now find in newspapers, etc.:

"he was sitting" --> "he was sat"
"she was standing" --> "she was stood"

[reginagiraffe]

Is that British!? I've been seeing that a LOT lately (mostly in Teen Wolf fic - a more American show I can't imagine) and it's been driving me crazy.

[mad_maudlin]

got: yeah, the participle "gotten" is strictly USian. I'm not entirely sure what the differences are between got and lexical have otherwise.

Singular/plural: there is a rule for this! BrEnglish treats nouns referring to collectives (team, band, jury, Parliament) as grammatical plurals, while USEnglish treats them as grammatical singulars. This can be extended beyond words that have the collective semantics built into their meanings, so can say something like "England (=England's sportsball team) have lost again."

Things like "maths," though, that's just a case of the British term being morphologically plural where the US term is singular.

[twistedchick]

My sense of things FWIMBW is that 'gotten' is something that happened in the early 1800s on this side of the pond and stayed, and never happened in Britain. It's pretty firmly in the language by the time Louisa May Alcott was writing, which says to me that it was around when she was growing up before the Civil War.

Also, we say 'I have got to go to the store', which indicates need, and 'I got to the store' (past tense); 'he got into trouble' (simple past tense) and 'he has gotten into trouble again', (a version of present tense that might be something like present continuous if I knew what tenses were being called these days.) Anyway, it seems to be a tense marker as much as anything else.

[resonant]

I do know that there used to be -en forms of a lot of verbs, and most of them have fallen (ha, there's one) out of the language -- in North Carolina I'd sometimes hear country people say "he has holpen me" rather than "he has helped me."

Now that I look at that, it sounds like Chaucer. I wonder whether, instead of happening over here, it was common in the language when English-speaking people were settling the U.S. Southeast, and then for some reason it stuck over here while it kept changing over there.

[china_shop]

At the risk of muddying the waters (I'm a Kiwi, so I should really just stay out of this discussion *g*), isn't "maths" (and "sports", for that matter) singular? I'd say, "Maths is my best subject," not "Maths are my best subject."

[twistedchick]

I can't find the link at the moment (sorry!) but there was something recently about performing Shakespeare in the way Shakespeare spoke the language -- and how the different pronunciation really showed up some of the jokes that make no sense these days. FWIW, I thought the Shakespearean period pronunciation sounded liked what I've heard in some parts of the Appalachians, which would also make sense, since that's where a lot of poorer folks (Highlanders leaving after Culloden, etc.) And the language stays around a lot longer, until now.

Where my mother grew up, in a small town outside Ottawa, the basic accent is so strongly Irish that it sounds like the entire crew just emigrated, when most have been there five generations or more.

[resonant]

I wondered about 'sports,' since I think maybe Brits say 'sport'? Because heaven forbid that two countries should speak the same language the same way.

[china_shop]

Ahhhh, that's why I got confused. We say "sport" too. *facepalm* (As in "I have absolutely no interest in sport.")

I've been writing in (some bastardised version of) AmEnglish for far too long.

[sineala]

I seem to recall hearing that "gotten" was older than "got" and that US dialects preserved the older forms, which is reasonable given that most US dialects also preserved, say, rhotacism.

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.)

[resonant]

I watched that video -- maybe I followed a link from your journal. And I sent a link to the spouse, who said, "They all sound like pirates!"

Pirate linguistics would probably be a fascinating field of study except that there probably aren't a lot of written sources.

When I lived in the NC mountains, people told me that dialects could vary noticeably from one 'cove' (valley) to another, but I never heard any difference. Most of the people I talked to were from someplace else anyway.

Also, I used to work with a bunch of guys from the north of England, and one of them had a noticeably different accent, which he said was because his mother was from Scotland.

[hesychasm]

Hmm, my English husband says he'd say "He lives on Baker Street," just as I (an American) would.

We often have "What? What does that mean?" sidebars to our normal conversations. But one memorable occasion was when a pot started boiling over on the stove and he kept telling me to "Turn off the hob! The hob!" I knew what that meant with my normal brain, but with the food getting ruined I was too flustered to understand what he wanted me to do for a few seconds. If he'd just left me well enough alone I'd have turned the darn stove off right away. (g)

[oxoniensis]

A couple of phrases that will instantly ping me as American, so I'll put them in reverse.

American English -> Brit English
Go wash your hair -> Go and wash your hair
[We (ie the average Brit - there will always be exceptions because we have a lot of different dialects) don't 'go do' something, we 'go and do' something.]

Gotten -> Got or Become
She's gotten lazy -> She's become lazy or She's grown lazy or She's got lazy

[rydra_wong]

Seconding (from the UK). It's "maths" as a different abbreviation for "mathematics" (I assume), not a plural term. I.e. you'd never hear anyone say "Maths are my best subject".

[resonant]

Well, see, this is the problem! I catch myself in chat typing 'aggro' because it's shorter, but that's an abbreviation used by no American ever. The internet is messing up the normal language transmission process.

"Y'all' is still shorter and easier to use than 'you lot,' though.

[resonant]

So 'maths is' but 'the band are.' Language is weird.

[oxoniensis]

I'll second that (as a Brit) - I live in a town, but on a street.

[twistedchick]

Hmm. The -en might have something to do with which verbs came from Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Norman French?

[runpunkrun]

This is fascinating. I hope you're going to share your phrasebook with us once it's mostly compiled?

[majoline]

Pirates are always Cornish (also what most people think Shakespeare sounds like) thanks to the Pirates of Penzance.

[dafna]

As an American who writes mostly in UK fandoms, these are the ones I find myself having to consciously look out for:

1) "Very" alternates
Brits don't use "really" as much as Americans do. Instead, "rather" and "quite" are more common

2) "Got hold of" (UK)
Follows your "got" rule, but the whole phrase is used a lot

3) "Ring" or "Rang" (UK) instead of "Call" or "Called" (US)

4) "Right" (UK) instead of "OK" (US)
I don't mean that Brits don't use OK at all, but when Americans use OK as a sort of conversational clearing of the throat, Brits are more likely to use "Right". As in, "Right. Moving on." where an American would say "OK. Moving on."

5) Common UK slang terms (other than the obvious bloody, bugger, wanker etc)
"Knob" -- John definitely calls Sherlock this at least once a week
"Balls' up" -- A fuck up, but less rude than the American version
"In there" -- have a chance at sex, as in "I'm definitely in there"
"Fit" -- hot
"Innit" -- Isn't it, but used at the end of sentences where an American would say "right?" and often used ironically by upper class speakers as it's associated with lower-class speech.
"Bloke" -- used where Americans would use "guy", as in "he's a good bloke"

6) Cultural things appropriate to the character
For ex., most UK men are likely to be fans of "Top Gear" and so references from that show are likely, e.g. "Cock." "The best/worst XXXX in ... the ... world." And younger characters might use a lot of TOWIE slang such as "well jel" or "reem", but John wouldn't.

[buddleia]

The only examples in your list which strike me as US only English are Math and Gotten. The phrases don't strike me as one or the other, but that might be a London thing or, more likely, each one looks fine to me where one might not to you. Watching this post with interest!

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

My high school English teacher (in US) always said that the language kept on evolving in England, but that America's constant staff of scary grammar teachers kept all the rules stagnant here. I think she may have been partly kidding....

[kindkit]

This is one I'm intrigued by, and if someone has more info about it I hope they'll chime in:

After "to need" or "to want," BrE (sometimes?) uses the -ing form of the verb where AmE uses the -ed form.

"He wants his head examining" --> "He needs his head examined."

Or, in a real example from series 3 of Cabin Pressure on the subject of airline safety videos:

"Anyone who needs the operation of a whistle explaining to them deserves to drown." --> "Explaining" would be "explained" in AmE.

[amberfox]

"aggro" is standard MMO for "aggression", usually seen in the form "Stop pulling aggro!" Other than that I don't see it.