"A Common Language" Review

Review of A Common Language

If you read the dialogue of A Common Language it won’t take you long to figure out that there is no major difference between the English spoken in the U.S. and the one in the United Kingdom. Going through the conversation transcripts of Albert Markwardt and Randolph Quirk you will reconsider the thoughts you had on the scale of the differences between the varrietes, and not dialects, of English spoken in those two parts of the world. Would you, or do you, associate Shakespeare with English spoken in America or that which is uttered in Great Britain? The answer will be revealed along with several aspects which concern the „split personality” of the English language.

Markwardt and Quirk disccuss the possible duality of English taking into account works by Noah Webster and H.L. Menken, the English word order on both sides of the Atlantic, overlapping in vocabulary, inflection endings, spelling pronunciations and inter-comprehensibility. They also look at the two countries’ nearly identical features in language, the importance of studying history to understand the forms of British and American English and the begining of their differentiation.All of these having been said, it useful to know that after over 300 years of separate existence there are only slight differences in the English spoken on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. For example the British English equivalent term of the American English term ″grilled″ is ″broiled″, ″maize″ instead of ″corn″, ″windscreen″ instead ″windshield″, ″parliament″ instead of ″congress″ and ″senate″, ″saloon″ instead of ″sedan″. One of the points regarding the divergences between the two varrietes of English is that even though there’s an expectance for there to be plentiful, there weren’t all that much to start off with. Some changes, after the colonies obtained their independence in 1776, occurred just for the sake of having them as you see in the spelling of the word ″humor″ and ″humor″....