Re: Free books

Le 03/08/2025 à 06:13, Jeff Barnett a écrit :
> On 8/2/2025 7:29 PM, Peter Moylan wrote:
>> On 03/08/25 01:57, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2 Aug 2025 13:03:05 +0200, [email protected] (J. J.
>>> Lodder) wrote:
>>>>
>>>> BTW, they say you write English (South African dialect)
>>>
>>> That's about right.
>>>
>>> People who don't specify such things somtimes are subjected to
>>> criticism from American readers who complain about books being full
>>> of spelling errors, and sometimes punctuation errors as well.
>>
>> I've been surprised by the number of people who don't know that there
>> are different dialects of English. I'm exposed regularly to different
>> dialects on the TV news, so surely it should be hard to miss.
>>
>> I have vaguely noticed that there are punctuation differences between
>> AusE and AmE, but have never seen a place where the difference in rules
>> is explained. The only one that really sticks out for me is the
>> illogical placement of commas and periods on the wrong side of a
>> quotation mark.
>
> I think it was GBS who said "England, the US, two great nations 
> separated by a common language."* As you show above, this quote never 
> gets old; the world just keeps finding new pairs to comment on.
> 
> * Oscar Wilde espoused the similar "We have really everything in common 
> with America nowadays, except, of course, language".

It seems to me that AmE and BrE can converge in formal writing, to the 
point where, if no different spellings crop up, one can be unsure which 
side of the Pond a passage comes from. In everyday speech, on the other 
hand, there's hardly anything that we express the same way.