Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This blog is written in en-GB

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 474 posts

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#291

Post by dofm »

lbriner wrote: post #262
mrob wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. Another exception: "moot", as in "moot point". In the UK it means "subject to debate", while in the US it means "inconsequential and therefore not subject to debate".

I'm British but I always understood it as the second meaning. e.g. "We were going to consider XYZ but now it's a moot point because the project is cancelled."

It sort of means both simultaneously, doesn't it (we could discuss it but it's inconsequential), but we do tend to use it in that formulation most.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#292

Post by dhosek »

jrm4 wrote: post #25
yde_java wrote: post #7

Being proud of your culture including your language and exercising it, at the risk of readers not understanding everything immediately, is not racism. In the worst case, a non-British gets curious about one expression or the other and looks it up. That's engagement.

It's funny, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, that "racism" pops up here? As a Black American, I find the author's idea extremely interesting and naturally began to wonder -- what might this idea (in code?) look like for us? Owing to history and whatnot, the role "Black American English" might play is of course very much a moving target, but it's interesting to think about.

As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”

The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#293

Post by mghackerlady »

myrmidon wrote: post #121
mghackerlady wrote: post #50

[flagged]

Regarding spelling: As an unbiased foreigner, many American variants seem superior to me (color, defense, program, meter) with british just being weird (and/or tainted by the french). Regarding Rowling: It seems to me that she gets more pushback/hate being, say "50% modern left-ish" than people that are even less aligned with left values. This gives me kinda medieval religion vibes (better an unbeliever/outsider than…

I personally have massive problems with Rowling because of her transphobic views, as I am a transexual woman and she completely misunderstands us and has used her influence to make our lives hell in the UK. The rest of her political views aren't something I give much thought as she isn't nearly as influential in those areas

>Sidenote: If you're referring to the zombie-ant fungus, those go by Ophiocordyceps nowadays

Neat. I should probably explain why I called her that. She started noticeably becoming more unhinged a bit after she posted a picture of herself in a house that very clearly had a mould problem. Thus, as a way of coping, we (as in, the subset of the trans community I partake in) started joking that her views were caused by the mould

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#294

Post by dofm »

jwatzman wrote: post #173
rahimnathwani wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in general, but there's one exception: use of the word 'tabled'. This means roughly the opposite in British and US English, and there's often insufficient surrounding context to alert the reader to their error. (OTOH I don't think you should suppress 'false friends' like biscuits, pants etc.)

There are a few others. “Quite” comes to mind — “I am quite hungry” or “that meal was quite good” can mean opposite things, depending on the speaker region and even voice inflexion if spoken.

Quite, indeed, has no simple meaning in British English. Any non-British attempt to assign one meaning that is different to their regional meaning is doomed to failure :-)

I use it in different senses all the time.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#295

Post by drnick1 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #148
ChrisRR wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your logic, chinese english or indian english are the defacto as they massively outnumber american english You just mean that you visit more american sites than other non-US english speaking sites

Go to France, or Japan, or Hungary, or somewhere like that. Someone there is visiting a web site that is in English. Now, what English is it most likely to be? My guess is US English, not UK English, not Indian English, not Chinese English. Sure, they may visit some of those sites, but I suspect that the most frequent will be US English.

> not Indian English, not Chinese English

There is no such thing as Chinese English, unless you politely mean "English as incorrect spoken by Chinese native speakers."

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#296

Post by irishcoffee »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #142
onionisafruit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes Americans wonder why English characters start talking about a basic cable channel when they really should be seeking medical help.

As a non-American I don't know what "basic cable" is (or what the other tiers are), just that you don't have free-to-air TV

I've watched the World Cup over free-to-air TV, US has a really fun match last night. I don't know where you got this idea from. I haven't paid for television service in decades.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#297

Post by MrJohz »

Symbiote wrote: post #230
MrJohz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time format in the UK is mostly 12hr, although people are generally aware of 24hr time. In my experience, while there are usually more similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe, Europeans also have more exposure to American English than to British English, so it ends up being a bit of a wash, particularly when it comes to pronunciation, spelling, or idioms.

In the UK anything "serious" like a train/plane ticket/timetable uses the 24 hour clock. That includes the default way to show a digital clock on a watch, phone or computer.

Timetables yes, but whenever I've bought a digital watch or set up a new device, the default has always been 12-hour. If you ask people the time in the afternoon, they will almost always give you the 12-hour format. People can understand both, but typically default to 12-hour times.

This is in stark constrast to Germany, say, where people colloquially use 24-hour times, with some exceptions for round times (e.g. 17:00 might be called "um fünf", but 17:05 would usually be described as "siebzehn uhr fünf", roughly translated as "seventeen oh five".

This might have changed in the last five years or so since I was living in the UK, but I've never noticed this be different when I was visiting, nor when speaking to British friends or colleagues.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#298

Post by vitally3643 »

kelvinjps10 wrote: post #180
ChrisRR wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure they were referring to the americans that this post is about

This culture they inherited from the British that annihilated the indigenous population compared with the Spanish or Portuguese that breeded with the native population

No, the Spanish did plenty of genocide as well.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#299

Post by hk1337 »

TimK65 wrote: post #176
prima-facie wrote: post #149

If you are from Europe, even if you're not living in the UK, the en-GB locale will feel a lot more familiar to you than the en-US one. It uses the dd-mm-yyyy date format like the rest of Europe, the start of the week is on Monday (vs Sunday in the US), the default paper size is A4 (vs US letter), measurement defaults are metric (indeed UK roads use imperial, but the default is otherwise metric), the time format uses…

So thankful that we use the correct date format (yyyy-mm-dd) in Sweden.

The superior date format. Superior to all others.

Re: This blog is written in en-GB

#300

Post by roryirvine »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #266
MrJohz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time format in the UK is mostly 12hr, although people are generally aware of 24hr time. In my experience, while there are usually more similarities between the UK and the rest of Europe, Europeans also have more exposure to American English than to British English, so it ends up being a bit of a wash, particularly when it comes to pronunciation, spelling, or idioms.

It’s been years since I saw any am/pm time in written form, while people will say 7:30, they will write 19:30

In my experience, people do sometimes still use am/pm for whole hour times ("4pm"), especially in informal writing.

But it would be beyond bizarre to write "3:59 pm"

Post reply on HN