=> I believe you have no intention of causing vexation by laughing at the British,Amy, but I also believe your words might have caused misunderstanding and… some vexation also, that’s why I stated my idea as above.
And please don’t misunderstand me, Amy, I know I have no right of saying what you should or should not speak out in this forum,but I just want to state my hope that next time you will be more careful when talking about such sensitive subjects as British English vs American English to avoid vexing British English speakers (AND LOVERS)
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I do not speak British English, Nessie, and that fact doesn’t bother me in the least. In addition, I see no reason why it should bother any speakers of British English or you that I don’t speak British English. I see no reason why I should not say what is and is not common or typical in American English. When there is a difference between American and British English, I see no reason whatsoever that I should pretend the difference does not exist.
I speak American English. I cannot and will not imitate British English. My English is different from the English in the UK. It’s as simple as that.
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It seems to have only a minor presence online; an advanced Google search by region returns:
c. 920 significant results for United Kingdom
c. 912 for the US
c. 580 for Australia
c. 220 for Ireland
c. 215 for South Africa
c. 5 for Nigeria, of doubtful provenance
(By “significant results”, I mean “excluding those that Google calls very similar.” If you include the “similar” results, the results for each country reach into 4 or more figures; except in the case of Nigeria, which remains at 5.)
To take random examples from the world of entertainment: it’s the English that e.g. David Attenborough, Jeremy Paxman and Will Self speak. Cf. the English spoken by David Beckham, Sir Alan Sugar, and Jamie Oliver, which includes non-standard elements.
How does Google do a search by region? Does that simply mean, for example, that .com and .uk are counted as two separate regions?
The word shan’t is basically not used in my neck of the woods at all. The main exception that comes to mind would be a possible usage accompanied by a mock British accent – which presumably would not sound particularly authentic to British ears. :lol:
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Could you tell us how you got those results, Mr P? We are around 8 million people using use the Internet in Nigeria. Most of us who use Nigerian English have a tendency to write quite formally - it’s just a Nigerian thing. The weak form shan’t might more be found as the strong form shall not when written by Nigerians. Speech is altogether another ball game.
I got this result from Google;
37,200 English pages for shan’t in an advanced regional search for the UK
When you google on a particular word or phrase, Google says e.g. [color=darkblue]Results 1 - 10 of about 794,000 for . (0.18 seconds)
This figure is quite misleading. It includes cached versions of pages, quotations in links, occurrences in listings for “My Discussions” in forums, repeated words in webpage headers, etc.
To eliminate these duplicates, find the last page with “real” entries. In the case of your UK search on “shan’t”, for instance, this is roughly page 92. Here you will find this note:
[color=blue]In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 923 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
“923” is therefore the significant number. The “very similar” entries are those that Google considers duplicates. (For interest, if you accept the offer to repeat the search, and go to a later page, the omitted entries are indented below the entries they duplicate. Google sometimes misses a duplicate; but on the whole, it’s quite reliable.)
Did you search more than one issue of each those newspapers?
The conclusion, maybe, when writing, we don’t use shan’t and some other contracted forms as often as you Brits, right?
There are 30 per mill. examples of shan’t (search sha n’t) in the Time corpus and 93 per mill. in the BYU Corpus of American English. I guess some Yanks must be using it.
As I said, “Molly”, we Yanks occasionally use shan’t humorously when we try to do a mock British accent. But try as we might, I’m sure the vast majority of our imitations of British English would not fool the vast majority of Brits for a second.
Just out of curiosity, why in the world should people search for shan’t with a space in the middle? That doesn’t seem quite kosher to me. I suppose the space in the middle of the word was supposed to replace a second (but invisible) apostrophe. Odd. Did you even attempt to find shan’t in Time or the BYU Corpus without the space?
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My “own original language” is Batu, which you already know after quizzing me a thousand times on other fora over such, and we haven’t, as far as I know, loaned anything to anyone, sorry to say. Mind, there’s only a few thousand of us, so…
BTW, what’s the difference between “your own original langauge” and “your original language”, for you?
No, they can provide some useful information when used appropriately. Unfortunately, however, I frequently find myself in the position of having to undo the damage and confusion that corpora misusers typically bring to ESL forums.
I think the implication of the article is that a speaker’s variety of Nigerian English might include directly translated phrases or structures from the local language.
There seems to be a distinctive use of future auxiliaries in Nigerian English, for instance. I wondered whether this had its origin in local language usage.
Doesn’t it see a bit out of place that someone who spends a lot of time putting the BYU BNC and the BYU American Corpus down, doesn’t know how to use it, doesn’t know its functions and features? I’d say the arrogance lies with Amy.
Well aren’t you a saint? And who undoes your damage? I sympathise though.You can’t imagine the cleaning up most of our teachers have to do when prescritivist teachers have been let loose on students.
