A hodge-podge of languages.
Sep. 14th, 2005 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allanaWhile trying to find out if British English puts a full-stop after title abbreviations (Mr, Mrs, Ms and so on), I've discovered that I'm writing in an interesting hodge-podge of languages.
* I always spell-check for British English.
* Yet I always use American dialogue punctuation and follow their quotation mark rules.
* I merrily ignore all the disapproving looks over comma splices, as they're quite standard in British English.
* I also use a nice mixture of verb forms, depending on my mood.
Having realised that, it's tempered with the realisation that language is fluid. Flicking through a Jeffrey Deaver book which happens to be sitting beside me, I note that he uses single quote marks for dialogue (UK), yet punctuates them in the US style. Interesting.
If I do end up going for a proofreading course I shall have a lot of bad habits to break, I think!!
In other news--through the awesome power of Rockfic chat, I finished a WIP. It's been hanging around my hard-drive, making mournful faces at me for months. Since the beginning of May, in fact. Now, I have another nine WIPs which I'd quite like to get done, so I'll be dragging anyone I can lay my hands on into chat. Maybe we can recreate the magic!
* I always spell-check for British English.
* Yet I always use American dialogue punctuation and follow their quotation mark rules.
* I merrily ignore all the disapproving looks over comma splices, as they're quite standard in British English.
* I also use a nice mixture of verb forms, depending on my mood.
Having realised that, it's tempered with the realisation that language is fluid. Flicking through a Jeffrey Deaver book which happens to be sitting beside me, I note that he uses single quote marks for dialogue (UK), yet punctuates them in the US style. Interesting.
If I do end up going for a proofreading course I shall have a lot of bad habits to break, I think!!
In other news--through the awesome power of Rockfic chat, I finished a WIP. It's been hanging around my hard-drive, making mournful faces at me for months. Since the beginning of May, in fact. Now, I have another nine WIPs which I'd quite like to get done, so I'll be dragging anyone I can lay my hands on into chat. Maybe we can recreate the magic!
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Date: 2005-09-14 01:26 pm (UTC)Forgive me, yesterday's post in my journal has put me into useless-facts, historian mode but did you know that English does not have a naturally occurring grammar system? Or spelling, for that matter. What we've got is imposed by Johnson et al in an attempt to "freeze" the language and keep it from mutating so far that people wouldn't be able to read Shakespeare. That was a major concern to 17th century English intellectuals and Johnson's Dictionary was, in part, created because of this. Before then, grammar didn't really exist and spelling was done phonetically. It sounds strange, but it's true. The strange grammar and archaic spelling we have basically resulted from the personal preferences of Johnson and his circle.
So it's Johnson's fault! ;-)