We gonna English today, people.

[southwest88]

What gender was the prison?

Yep. There's an old puzzle/joke about an airplane crashing on the border between two countries. The punchline is: Where were the survivors buried?

The trick there is to get past survivors quickly, & have the victim focus on the burial.

Back to the case @ hand - I want to know what kind of material tensile strength was required to hang a prison, & What was the point? It's not like anything of the sort would so much as inconvenience a building, let alone prove fatal to it.

[southwest88]

eh as long as the point gets across proper diction isnt important. Plus theres the typo phenomena online

It depends on what kind of writing or speech it is. In day-to-day conversation or e-mail among intimates, yah, the bar is set pretty low. In formal writing/speech - there are norms to satisfy; or you risk losing your audience.

[Chris]

[southwest88]

The correct English word is back-pedalling, the US-English form is back-pedaling. US-English is a dialect - like Australian English, or Canadian English. And lol, if we are going to talk about language, the title of this thread - " We gonna English today, people." is totally ungrammatical in any form of English.

Yes & no. There isn't a single English dialect even in England - there's standard English, C_ckney, Midlands, Manchester, Lake District, Scottish & Irish English (tinged by their indigenous languages), Welsh (although that one seems to be fading, a pity), & so on. Standard English (Received Pronunciation - think BBC announcers) is put forth as the standard, but that reminds me of Castilla declaring its dialect the national language in Spain, when there isn't a consensus on that.


Basque, for instance, is hardly related @ all to Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc. The written forms are mostly intelligible to each other, again, TMK, excepting Basque. Does UK even have a royal academy of the English language? The Romance-language countries seem to find the idea irresistible.

[Cletus]

The correct English word is back-pedalling, the US-English form is back-pedaling. US-English is a dialect - like Australian English, or Canadian English.

It used to be. Now, we own the language and have just allowed you to keep the name.

[southwest88]

It used to be. Now, we own the language and have just allowed you to keep the name.

There are more non-native English speakers in the World now than native-English speakers. It's a funny world. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

"Estimates of the number of English speakers who are second language and foreign-language speakers vary greatly from 470 million to more than 1,000 million depending on how proficiency is defined.^[11] Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers by a ratio of 3 to 1.^[62] In Kachru's three-circles model, the "outer circle" countries are countries such as the Philippines,^[77] Jamaica,^[78] India, Pakistan, Singapore,^[79] and Nigeria^[80][81] with a much smaller proportion of native speakers of English but much use of English as a second language for education, government, or domestic business, and where English is routinely used for school instruction and official interactions with the government.^[82]

"Those countries have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from an English-based creole to a more standard version of English. They have many more speakers of English who acquire English in the process of growing up through day by day use and listening to broadcasting, especially if they attend schools where English is the medium of instruction. Varieties of English learned by speakers who are not native speakers born to English-speaking parents may be influenced, especially in their grammar, by the other languages spoken by those learners.^[76] Most of those varieties of English include words little used by native speakers of English in the inner-circle countries,^[76] and they may have grammatical and phonological differences from inner-circle varieties as well. The standard English of the inner-circle countries is often taken as a norm for use of English in the outer-circle countries.^[76]"

(My emphasis - more @ the URL)

It's an interesting subject to study. & opinions vary all over the world - a sure sign that something is happening.

[Chris]

It used to be. Now, we own the language and have just allowed you to keep the name.

It's said by linguists that American English is closer to Shakespearean English than British English which has evolved into something else altogether.

[Captdon]

Was the theres on purpose? We all know it should be "they'res"

There's.

[Captdon]

Was the executed prison hanged or hung (or both)?

Pictures can be hung, but people are always hanged. ... Hanged, as a past tense and a past participle of hang, is used in the sense of “to put to death by hanging,” as in Frontier courts hanged many a prisoner after a summary trial.

[William]

Yes & no. There isn't a single English dialect even in England - there's standard English, C_ckney, Midlands, Manchester, Lake District, Scottish & Irish English (tinged by their indigenous languages), Welsh (although that one seems to be fading, a pity), & so on. Standard English (Received Pronunciation - think BBC announcers) is put forth as the standard, but that reminds me of Castilla declaring its dialect the national language in Spain, when there isn't a consensus on that.


Basque, for instance, is hardly related @ all to Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc. The written forms are mostly intelligible to each other, again, TMK, excepting Basque. Does UK even have a royal academy of the English language? The Romance-language countries seem to find the idea irresistible.

Actually, according to what I have read, RP is the standard form of English pronunciation - it is not a dialect.

RP is an accent, not a dialect, since all RP speakers speak Standard English. In other words, they avoid non-standard grammatical constructions and localised vocabulary characteristic of regional dialects. RP is also regionally non-specific, that is it does not contain any clues about a speaker’s geographic background. But it does reveal a great deal about their social and/or educational background

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/so...pronunciation/

But of course the British Isles have many dialects (which sprang up at a time when travel was not available to the poor,) but there is only one English language, and RP is the most easily understood accent. But English, like every other, is a living language, and we don't need an academy to tell us what the current forms are. We are taught grammar in school, and while new words evolve, grammatical construction stays much the same.