Re: American English

Joel scripsit:

> Yes, I often wonder why more things between the two languages don't
> differ.  It HAS been 400 years, and on the lingustic scale, that is
> quite a long time.  Consider what happened to English between 1000 and
> 1400.. It went from Old English to a kind of Middle English.  Yet, I
> have no doubt it would be that difficult to understand someone from
> 1600, although I imagine the pronounciation would be somewhat different.
Separation in space and in time are fundamentally different.  During that
400 years, there has been plenty of interchange across the Pond.
(In fact, we don't know whether there was any real split before about
1800 other than in matters of vocabulary.)

There is no interchange between the past and the present at all.

--
John Cowan                              <jcowan@...>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Common Gaelic in Cyrillic script!
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang
John Cowan   <jcowan@...>   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
"One time I called in to the central system and started working on a big
thick 'sed' and 'awk' heavy duty data bashing script.  One of the geologists
came by, looked over my shoulder and said 'Oh, that happens to me too.
Try hanging up and phoning in again.'"  --Beverly Erlebacher