Pilkingtube said:
Hey so i'm wondering after seeing a few comments from US citizens on this site about English grammar. When a person is Spanish and they speak Spanish, their language is called Spanish. When the Japanese speak Japanese, it is called Japanese. When the English speak English, it is called British English rather than English.
Does this also happen for French Canadians, who call the French version of French 'European French' and Brazilians who call the Portuguese version of Portuguese 'Iberian Portuguese' or is it just the US citizenship who modify the name of the original language If so, why?
I am curious because the majority of Australians, Indians and New Zealanders, who speak English too, don't seem to categorise English into 'British English' and 'Indian English' as much, despite the differences being clear and defined (Such as in India where English isn't really a well established language as most people speak primarily Hindi I believe).
Also, on a less serious/curious note.. what is the reasoning behind the unsual order of the American Date System? The progression is usually in ascending/descending order, such as seconds>minutes>hours>days>months>years or years>months>days>hours>minutes>seconds but whenever it is written on an American document it flows seconds>minutes>hours>months>days>years, why is it in such an unintuitive layout?
When it comes to the date system it has to do with efficiency compared to nations that are more mired in tradition.
The bottom line is that when your filing things the older files are usually moved out and archived. Typically you have the year on the drawer or box, and then when you flip through them the first thing you see is the month, once you have the month you can narrow it down to the day, the year is the furthest over since it's the least relevent and only really useful for determining what box/drawer it goes in if it gets misplaced or misfiled.
Putting the year first would be counter productive since by looking at the files to begin with you already know that. The day is pointless before you know what month it is.
Especially when dealing with the "Old World" (Europe) it's kind of funny how the rivalry works. The bottom line is that while similar, things in Europe work they way they do mostly because of tradition. It worked then, it will work now, and it's a pain to teach someone a new system for an efficiency increase when the old one has worked just as well. The US on the other hand broke free of a lot of the trappings of European bureaucracy and defined things on it's own depending on what worked the best. Being only 200 years old we haven't yet run into a group of "young turks" with better ways than us, so we can be the stodgy old codgers.
Of course a lot of things like the order of dates becomes semantics with electronic filing systems. When your not thinking in terms of physical record keeping and archives it's easy to go "WTF" when you just see the date organized on a computer screen.
I incidently know the specifics of WHY things work like this because I've spent a lot of time writing and filing reports, and digging around to find paperwork. Honestly, it doesn't surprise me there are so many jokes about the speed and efficiency of european bureaucracy because it would probably take me twice as long under that system.
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When it comes to language, it largely comes down to the US being a melting pot nation with a somewhat unique style of cultural identity. We don't feel the name to differntiate ourselves to quite that degree, where language is a matter of cultural pride for a lot of other nations. Our complaint about immigrants not learning the language has more to do with efficiency and adaption than any paticular connect between language and culture, and of course that's one of the problems with getting people to adapt in many cases, since a lot of them don't really want to become Americans so much as maintain their own culture, live seperatly from our society for all intents and purposes, and draw the benefits of being US citizens. That however gets into another entire disucission
The British will specify "British English" largely as a method of diffentiating themselves from the US and asserting a cultural identity, where Americans will rarely say "American English" since we really don't care, and are using the name of England (which we broke away from) to begin with).
As far as the international usage of English, that comes from the US being the dominant world power and also the biggest positive cultural force the planet has ever seen, like it or not. As many people will point out the US might not be a conquering empire in a traditional sense, but we have none the less conquered the world with things like "Starbucks", "The Big Mac", and "Melrose Place" like noone before us. Thus we and our basic usage of the language's name have defined what people call it. On top of this our style of superpowerdom has made English the default language of business, and catapulted it into a league of it's own internationally. Even when no Americans or members of the UK are involved during business meetings it's not uncommon for everyone to switch to english as the default language that will be used by everyone, and also the language the contract will be written in even if
none of the people involved are native english speakers. It's funny that this is mentioned right alongside the bit about dates, which lead to discussions of paperwork, because one complaint I've run into is how English is almost like what Latin used to be in some countries where they vehemently hold onto their language for cultural reasons, but at the same time require all their official documents and business records to be in english. Thus like scholors or the religious had to learn latin (to read the bible and recite prayers, and read documents and books in universities), a clerk frequently has to know english fairly well even if they don't use it for anything other than the paperwork, especially if the business is operating internationally. It's the "middle ground" language.
Interestingly, I think one thing that we're eventually going to see happen despite great opposition is English becoming a mandatory language for the planet. People will still have cultural tongues, but as a secondary thing. Simply because it will help efficiency in communications and the spread of ideas, and also because so much of the world is already using if only for administrative purposes.
