Re: Xy4 spelling and Microlytics

[hickling@xxxxxxxx (Lee Hickling)]

Carl Distefano wrote in reply to a note from Peter Evans

>Yanks and other non-speakers of English: check out Brian Tung's
>"Unofficial Official Dictionary of UK-US Terms",
>http://gost.isi.edu/brian/liter/dictukus.html. Useful and amusing.

   Yanks and other non-speakers of English, indeed.
   My wife has many Mexican aunts, uncles and cousins, and one of the
aunts is married to a Spaniard, who speaks what was, maybe still is, called
Castilian. In school I was taught that it was the standard language, and all
the rest were dialects.
   The Mexicans thought the way Salvador talked was cute and quaint.
They'd never think of emulating it. The Spanish they spoke was, with minor
variatiions, the Spanish of the New Work hispanophone countries. They knew
they were in the majority, and by definition spoke the standard tongue.
Salvador spoke a dialect.
   Americans feel the same way about speakers of Beeb or Oxbridge. It's
charming, it's amusing to hear, but it's not the standard of English speech
any more. General American is.
  Linguistically, the majority speech is the standard speech. As the
mayor of the District of Columbia said when he came back from a crack
cocaine conviction to be re-elected, "Get used to it."

Lee Hickling