Americans really don't get irony do they.
No, but they do get mad
BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
81–90 of 180 posts
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#821. All of this could have been avoided but for the want of some MPs for some colonies. But no. 2. "License: Not Specified" instead of "Licence: Not Specified"
Speaking as a non-native English speaker, I'm not sure how I feel about American imperialism replacing British imperialism in general, but as far as English spelling and phonology goes, god bless America.
Speaking as a non-native English speaker, I'm not sure how I feel about American imperialism replacing British imperialism in general, but as far as English spelling and phonology goes, umm… God save the king? Oh dear no… What am I saying!?
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#83Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#84Obliged to point out that "color" is how it's spelled in Latin, Old French, and therefore post-Norman English, that the superfluous "u" was added later by the English aristocracy because they were jealous of how fancy the newly-respelled French looked.
Another fun fact... almost all "American spelling" came from Britain, i.e. variants that died out in Old Blighty in the 1800s. Accent as well. For the most part, they were the ones that changed! There's more—the -ize spelling comes directly from the old Greek spelling. -ise and -re were forced-on/taken from French. The British like to taunt the French, but apparently have forgotten about the spelling thing, and criti…
The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially.
One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this.
Shakespearean English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Some good reddit threads on the matter:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ju72b/is_th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/j3imwe/is_it_t...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/9oke84/is_...
Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable decisions here. BrE standardised earlier and kept some Frenchisms like -ise (the OED maintains that -ize is correct with -ise being valid) but this was likely because -ise is correct for some words like advertise, or prise (which AmE dropped entirely for pry, and weirdly took up burglarize) and universal -ise makes spelling easier. In some cases it's just because words/pronunciations came much later from French in BrE whereas they came from Spanish and Italian in AmE. American spelling on the other hand was intentionally simplified, and although the spelling reform Webster wanted never truly happened (if it did you'd be speaking the American languaj) it did lead to the dropping of -our for -or, -re for -er, -oe for -e, etc.
I'm biased but I do prefer the etymological spelling, even if it means that we do say lieutenant differently.
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#85This should be paired with British PHP ( https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/ )
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#86Absolutely terrible. You should spell everything in American English when programming as like it or not the standard in every codebase and programming language going to be this. I am British but coding is not language, and trying to be clever like this is incredibly counterproductive especially in a diverse team. If you want British English to be used why shouldn’t the German on your team be able to use their languag…
Not every codebase. OpenStreetMap uses British English, for example.
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, that is not the perspective of the creator of BritCSS, who refers to current CSS property names as "bastardised" spellings.
I mean, wouldn't the U.S as a nation essentially be a bastard child of Britain, and thusly use a bastardized English?
Strangely, it's the insular dialects across Britain that have become more bastardised over time. The North American English dialects are far more conservative when it comes to evolution. As this BBC article[1] says: "[...] although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer."
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20180207-how-americans...
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#88I believe that some people's actual full-time job is to translate software from US English to British English. I wonder what that job feels like after the thousandth time you've replaced color with colour and neighbor with neighbour
As a programmer working in the UK I've never been asked to rewrite something into British English. I have been instructed to convert some old codebase to American spellings to "avoid confusion". Probably about 6 times in 20 years of professional programming and usually by some product manager based in San José following an acquisition. This is why the library exists I expect.
I've been dodging requests to "fix" British date formats in published articles to meet US reader expectations for a while now ...
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except now there's also the "Referrer-Policy" header, which is spelled correctly. I wonder if the spec committee debated calling it Referer-Policy for consistency.
Personally, I would have, since it refers to the Referer header it seems like it should follow the same spelling. It would be like CSS having a "color" attribute, but then doing something like "default-colour".
Exactly, a Referer on the web is its own thing now. Referrer should be considered a typo if you’re referring to the Referer header.
Re: BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English
#90Kind of funny the animus the author has against US spellings. It's nothing but shade to refer to US spellings as 'simplified' and UK spellings as 'traditional', regardless of the merit of the argument for doing so. I can't imagine anyone will really need to use this, but it seems to have let the author work out some issues.
Spoken like someone who hasn't had their code fail because they spelt words correctly ;)
This comment is perfect for being equal amounts 'lol' and 'grrr'.