What is the language "British"?

[jdow]

From: "Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net>

> On Tuesday 29 August 2006 03:24, Tim wrote:
>>On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 22:56 -0400, William Case wrote:
>>> Some day it would be interesting and fun to get comments on why each
>>> of these forms of English is needed in a computer.
>>
>>Because when you use your computer, you want it to use your language,
>>not someone else's.  Second to that annoyance, you see kids in your
>>country incorrectly spelling things, because they're using the language
>>of another country, learning it from their computer.
>>
>>Some time ago our newspapers started using American spelling, which *is*
>>"incorrect" to do in Australia.  One reason given was that it was a
>>complete pain trying to work around the American spell checker.
> 
> Humm, if it results in less miss-understandings between the peoples by 
> pushing the people toward a common ground for language usage, I can't see 
> as its an undesirable effect.  We can all argue about color/colour, 
> honor/honour, but we all know those meanings well.  Local dialects of a 
> language are ok as long as they don't drift too far and result in errors 
> due to miss-understanding the lexical and pronunciation nuances of the 
> locality.
> 
> Winston C. was right, but we shouldn't get so carried away with our 
> so-called local rights as to cause a general deterioration in 
> understanding.
> 
> In the above case, I believe there are English(GB) versions of the spell 
> checkers available, so why don't they use them?  OTOH, the Aussies do have 
> a vernacular thats uniquely Australion, so maybe it would be best for the 
> GB version of the spell checker to be forked/updated to include commonly 
> used, Aussie unique words and phrases & call it the English(AU) version.

And potatoe WAS/IS a legitimate spelling for potato in the US at the
time illiterate lefties made it a means of tarring Dan Quayle.

{^_-}