> On Mar 29, 2017, at 2:18 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > wrote: > >>> It's amazing how isolated pockets of our cultures can be from each >>> other! "Multiple peoples divided by a common language" > > On Wed, 29 Mar 2017, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > ... >> Or the time an English co-worker related the story surrounding her >> initial job interval in the US. She described the stunned look on the >> face of the desk clerk at the local Holiday Inn when she asked to be >> knocked up at 7:30 the next morning. > > British V American/"Colonial"? idioms are not surprising. > What's more surprising are the mutually exclusive variations within a country.
Not at all. Linguists have a term for this: dialects. Actually, that applies anywhere, country borders are not relevant; it simply means two variations of a language that are "mutually intellegible". That may be a bit of a judgment call. As a not-native speaker of English I tend to have trouble with, say, the Welsh dialect of English. If dialects diverge to the point that they aren't mutually intellegible, a linguist calls that two languages. So China has lots of languages, not just many dialects. Conversely, some argue that Norway and Sweden use two dialects of a single language. paul