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Originally Posted by JSWolf
Just as you find A.M. annoying vs AM. I find the UK way of Mr, Dr, Jr, etc without the . (Mr., Dr., Jr.) annoying.
I wish English would standardize. (IMHO), why did the UK have to go so odd in some cases? The US and the UK started with the same English because the Pilgrims were from the UK. So what happened to the UK?  |
The UK and USA never had the same English and the UK didn't exist till 1801, when Ireland was added and has never had "one" English. England and Scotland joined to make Political Great Britain in 1707.
Wales is broadly two areas in terms of English. England has four major regions (linguistically and ethnically), The North (Cumbria, Yorkshire, Northumberland), the West Country and the rest which includes the Home Counties and London.
Scotland has maybe four variations of English as does Ireland, the Northern & NI English being like past of Scotland. In fact North East Ulster and part of Southwest Scotland was the Kingdom of Dalriada for nearly 1000 years.
The British isles also has Manx, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Doric and Ulster-Scots as well as now a lot of Polish and Chinese. This affects English.
Webster and Académie Française are prescriptive. The OED reflects usage because real-life language changes with time. New words are added. Common separate word pairs become hyphenated and then a single compound word. Spelling drifts, though more slowly since Webster & Johnson.
The so-called Pilgrims only brought some English to the Americas and they came from the Netherlands in
1608 because it was too free and they were losing young people. They had caused trouble in England since Henry VIII, which is why they were "persecuted" and went to Amsterdam. They were not representative of more than a minority of English speakers. People on the Mayflower had to sign to agree to be bound by the Puritan Elders (all male) even if not Puritans. They are not a good example.
Many other groups settled in the Americas from Europe.
Samuel Johnson published in 1755. It is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. That's nearly 150 years later. It's dubious that many English speakers in USA spoke or wrote like the Pilgrim Fathers by then. There was also Spanish, French and the native languages.
Alaska and California both had Russian speakers. Alaska "sold" to USA in 1867.
Noah Webster's Dictionary was 1806, about 50 years after Johnson and deliberately changed or ignored existing usage in the USA. It was totally prescriptive and many aspects were Webster's own prejudice.
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Webster's dictionaries were a redefinition of Americanism within the context of an emergent and unstable American socio-political and cultural identity. Webster's identification of his project as a "federal language" shows his competing impulses towards regularity and innovation in historical terms.
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—Wikipedia
A universal standard English was always a fantasy. Webster managed to largely impose this on White Americans. A Kenyan girl a few years ago with perfect English was bullied by "people of color" in her New York school. I know some Kenyans in Ireland and they speak perfect English, more so than local people.
The USA has a few major flavours of English, but pretends they don't.