At 12:12 PM 12/01/1999 -0800, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
>Are there any U.S. citizens feeling offended when the name
>of their national language is called "English"
It is not so much feeling offended as feeling that a dialect associated
with a specific region is being used to represent [under the guise of being
an all-inclusive tag for the respective Language] another dialect. While
"English" as used in the UK shares most of the same set of words as
"English" as used in the USA there are many cases where words exist in one
that do not in the other, where different words (lift vs elevator) are used
for the same purpose in the two dialects, or where the same word means
different things based on which dialect is being used. The latter case can
be important since in many cases the use of one as opposed to the other
meaning is not necessarily apparent from seeing it in use (such as the
sentence "meet me in the First Floor Lobby" will have an American waiting
one floor up from the street level/entrance while a Brit will be in the
Street Level Lobby). Thus directions (or other types of text) may need to
be repeated a number of times and flagged for Dialect (with the ambiguous
terms restated in the correct form each time).
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