clamky@hotmail.com <clamky@hotmail.com> schrieb:

> Thank you! Makes watching Chyrosran22's [1] crusade against US
> pronunciation of the element even more entertaining. Wonder is there's
> similar retort to his metric vs imperial assault (this time though, SI
> is _clearly_ superior)

Three andecdotes:

Somebody A chemist from England and chemical engineer from the US
driving together with a German chemical engineer (who was sitting
in the back, not participating in the discussion).

The Englishman and the American discuss the superiority of the
inch/mile/whatever system, because it forces people to think more
(or something). Then, they discuss the difference between a US
and an Imperial gallon. 'nuff said.

Second: At a chemical facility in the US, I saw a conversion table
between different units of volume. They gave their tank volume in
cubic feet and their flows in gallons per minute.

Third: A German, exasperated with US units (what is a "mil" of
pressure again? Almost metric) asked for SI units. He got what
he asked for: Kelvin, cubic meters per second, ...

On 9/28/2021 12:11 AM, David Brown wrote:
> On 28/09/2021 02:11, Stephen Fuld wrote:
>> On 9/23/2021 1:55 PM, David Brown wrote:
>>> On 23/09/2021 22:39, Terje Mathisen wrote:
>>>> John Dallman wrote:
>>>>> In article <sihcrp$nc0$1@newsreader4.netcologne.de>,
>>>>> tkoenig@netcologne.de (Thomas Koenig) wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> It's not silicon that needs to be dissolved, it's silicon oxide.
>>>>
>>>> Is this US English?
>>>
>>> It is also real English.  (American English gets some elements wrong,
>>> such as misspelling and mispronouncing "aluminium".)
>>
>> You probably blame us for "corrupting" the Canadians about this as well.
>>  :-)
>>
>> One of the differences which strikes me as odd is that we Americans make
>> decisions, whereas people who learned British English take them.
>>
>
> Let's not expand a difference between the USA and the UK in the
> /language/ into a general cross-Atlantic war! Otherwise, I'll be forced
> to quote John Cleese...

Oh, far from it. I think that while most American's regard the
vocabulary differences as "curious", we love listening to British
speakers. I think we regard it as "classy". Witness the success of BBC
dramas on the US Masterpiece Theater TV show.

And, while I have never heard you speak, if you have a Scottish Burr, as
long as we can understand it, we will love you for it.

> For most of the spelling differences between English and American, the
> American spellings are older and more traditional - basically, you
> missed out on the trend in the UK for making spellings look more French
> in order to seem sophisticated and cultured. (The English hated the
> French /people/ and the country of France at the time, and were
> regularly at war with them, but the court loved the French /language/.)
> Thus it was in the UK, from the royal court down, that we got extra
> letters added to words like "colour" and "neighbour".

I never knew that. About when did this trend occur?

> In the case of "aluminium" vs. "aluminum", the original spelling was
> "aluminum". But American scientists had always used "aluminium", and
> British scientists copied it because it fitted well with the names of
> many other elements (like sodium and potassium.) The change in the USA
> back to "aluminum" came later, when non-scientists started using the
> word more. Apart from Canada, where the people are too polite to argue
> with the USA, everyone else around the world uses "aluminium". So yes,
> here you got that one wrong :-)

The Wikipedia article gives some interesting discussion on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology

--
- Stephen Fuld
(e-mail address disguised to prevent spam)

On 2021-09-27, clamky@hotmail.com <clamky@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> much smaller than the normal regional dialect variations.)
>
> In the past couple of days I have been trying to locate a link to your
> post here on comp.arch (?) that went something like - "... every
> Norwegian speaks at least 6 languages, 5 of which are/is(?)
> Norwegian..." but ny-internet hasn't been cooperating and I concede
> defeat. Perhaps you remember it? Perhaps someone can enlighten me how to
> search for old usenet articles in an age when dejanews is gone and my
> attempts to search via google.groups where defeated by Mountain View
> robots incessantly trying to:
> a) ascertain my link to humanity
> b) showing some form of registration with google down my throat
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pky7km/usenet-archive-utzoo-online
Google destroyed usenet, avoid like plague.

--

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Evil Sinner!