Manuel Arostegui Ramirez wrote: > I used to think that the difference is not as big as they told us, but I > remember when I went to NY for a week.It was quite frustrating to miss > loads of expressions when talking to folks there. Sadly, perhaps, any difference is disappearing fast. My 10-year old grand-daughter talks a kind of mid-Atlantic or MTV English, which is not surprising since she watches Disney channel all day long. She would be as likely to say "elevator" as "lift". Her friend next door from Northern Ireland can "do" a Northern accent if requested, but normally speaks in the same way. Dialects in the UK and Ireland have all but disappeared. When I was young Geordies and Glaswegians were unintelligible. Now someone with a real accent is treasured as an antique. (I introduced a Scottish friend of mine recently, and someone commented, "You do that accent beautifully".) People in NY and London (and Paris) are unintelligible because they speak too fast, and anyway don't care if you understand. English everywhere is converging fast, and only pedants worry about the differences. Anyway, as the OP, my complaint was that Fedora should not describe the language as en_US unless there is some other variant of English on offer. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
