Text XXI

Can you speak American English? How different American English is from British English?

1. Check the pronunciation of the following words in a dictionary. See Ap­pendix III. Practice saying them:

Stream, wholesale, descendants, august, anarchic, artificial, ultimately, conquer, ubiquitous, routine, via, vivacity, maintaining, supple.

WHY DO SOME AMERICANISMS IRRITATE PEOPLE?

British people are used to the language. The Americans imported stream of Americanisms entering the English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here.

My grandfather came to Lon­don on the outbreak of World War I and never lost his mid-European ac­cent. His descendants have blended into the landscape. That’s what hap­pens with immigration. It’s the same with vocabulary migration.

The French have always hated this process with a very Gallic pas­sion, and their most august body L’Academie Francaise issues regular rulings on the avoidance of imported words. English isn’t like that. It is a far more flexible language. Anarchic even.

That’s part of the secret of its success. It has triumphed where Latin, French and the artificial lan­guage of Esperanto all ultimately failed, and become the natural me­dium of global communication. This is the version of English sometimes known as “Globish”. To use it re­quires only a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and, so it is said, a vo­cabulary of a mere 1,500 words.

But what the world is speak­ing — even on levels more sophisti­cated than basic Globish — is not necessarily our English. According to the Oxford Guide to World English, “American English has a global role at the beginning of the 21st Century comparable to that of British English at the start of the 20th”.

The alarming part is that this is starting to show in the language we speak in Britain. American us­ages no longer swim to our shores as single spies. They come in bat­talions.

In the 1930s, the talkies took hold and represented the first over­whelming manifestation of American cultural power. This was reinforced in the 1940s by the presence of large numbers of US servicemen in Britain and the 1950s marked the heyday of the Western.

There may have been a brief pushback after that, in the era of Swinging London, as Bill Haley and Elvis faded, and the Beatles and Stones conquered the world, along with words like “fab” and “groovy”. In the years since, however, the movement seems to have become overwhelming, unstoppable and al­most wholly one way, with the ex­ception of Harry Potter.

American culture is ubiquitous in Britain on TV and the web. As our computers talk to us in Ameri­can, I always have to agree to a li­cense spelt with an s. I am invited to print something in color without the u. I am told “you ghat mail”. It is, of course, always e-mail — never our own more natural usage, e-post.

In many respects, English and American are not coming together. When it comes to new technology, we often go our separate ways. They have cellphones — we have mobiles. We go to cash points or cash ma­chines — they use ATMs. We have still never linked hands on motoring terminology — petrol, the boot, the

bonnet, known in the US as gas, the trunk, the hood.

Yet in the course of my own lifetime, countless routine British us­ages have either been superseded or are being challenged by their Ameri­can equivalents. We no longer watch a film, we go to the movies. We in­creasingly have trucks not lorries. A hike is now a wage or price rise not a walk in the country.

Ugly and pointless new usages appear in the media and drift into everyday conversation:

• Faze, as in “it doesn’t faze me”

• Hospitalize, which really is a vile word

• Elevator for lift

• Rookies for newcomers,who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.

• Guy, less and less the centre­piece of the ancient British fes­tival of 5November — or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.

And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of fir­ing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outage. And it is just that.

I am all for a living, breathing language that evolves with the times. I accept that estate agents prefer to sell apartments rather than flats — they sound more enticing. I accept that we now have freight trains rather than goods trains — that’s more accurate.

I accept that sometimes Ameri­can phrases have a vigour and vivac­ity. A relative of mine told me re­cently he went to a business meeting chaired by a Californian woman who wanted everyone to speak frankly. It was “open kimono”. How’s that for a vivid expression?

But what I hate is the sloppy loss of our own distinctive phraseol­ogy through sheer idleness, lack of self-awareness and our attitude of cultural cringe. We encourage the di­versity offered by Welsh and Gae­lic — even Cornish is making a comeback. But we are letting British English wither.

Britain is a very distinct country from the US. Not better, not worse, different. And long live that differ­ence. That means maintaining the in­tegrity of our own, subtle and supple version — the original version — of the English language.

Adaptedfrom bbc.co.uk.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-08