Mike Ellis wrote:
> It was a little joke, but I see why I'm going to have to clear some things
> up. Tea is not very popular here, but the whole west coast of Canada and
> the US is known for voracious consumption of coffee. "Tea" is "tea"; I just
> don't drink it.
I imagined as much, I just wanted to make certain.
> As for tea=dinner, keep in mind that it was Rachel Klippenstein - self-
> allegedly Canadian - who started this thread; to my knowledge (lest we
> spawn yet another thread...), nowhere in North America is the word "tea"
> used for "dinner". So until this stage, I'd been reading tea=beverage.
Fair enough. I wasn't aware of this.
> P.S. You think this is bad? Wait a thousand years until the English
> dialects have turned into a whole family of different languages.
A thousand years? I would reckon less than that... A few hundred years
would be more accurate. Once it becomes harder to understand Americans
(and they use these accents on tv.) I reckon tv. in extra-American
countries will have to dub/sub American tv. (like it's done in
non-English countries), and then we won't have American influence on our
speech any more, giving us extra sound changes or preventing ones that
might otherwise have happened from happening.
Tristan.