Delirium wrote:
Angela wrote:
One reason is that the differences between
American and British
English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few
words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed
behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would
then be wrong in both languages.
I can't seem to find the page now, but I seem to remember a policy
page where we've basically settled on a compromise,
partially-invented "international English" punctuation style for
clarity and because it's not really worth fighting over. The
compromise included the British-style "put punctuation _after_
closing quotation marks", and something from US style that I can't
remember. As for being "wrong", that's only the case if you happen
to be a [[en:prescription and description|grammatical
prescriptivist]], which not all of us are.
But as far as the spelling issue goes, it seems like a solution in
search of a problem. The current approach seems to be working well
enough.
I heartily disagree. The current approach is a constant source of
disagreement and worsening of linguistic tensions. I am always running
into minor tiffs over British vs American spelling that could be
eliminated with multi-dialect support. This would also mean that when
I run into a Britishism on an article that might be confusing or
misleading to an American reader, instead of changing it to an
Americanism and drawing the ire of the original author (or changing it
to something neutral and probably drawing the ire of the original
author), the original author's Britishism can stay, the Americanism
will be viewable to Americans, and everyone is a little bit happier.
I think that the minor increase in complexity for editing is far
outweighed by the increase in understandability, familiarity, and
dialectical consistency. As for syntactic differences between the
dialects, I have yet to see anything that differed by more than a
handful of words. Most of the major differences are in informal,
colloquial speech.
I agree with Mark and Angela on this. Your position is premised on their
being only two strictly demarcated forms of English. Canadian English
is a hybrid that lies between the two, and often depends on the
preferences of the individual who happens to be writing. Australians
and South Africans may generally tend toward Commonwealth English, but
they too can have their esceptions. Indian English must have a lakh of
interesting variations, and we haven't yet considered African and
Caribbean variants. I can't possibly imagine a hardware fix that would
adequately deal with all these rich varieties.
Ec