Sweet story...

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Two things:  It is quite different when one mangles one's own language and when one mangles someone else's.  This is not entirely dissimilar to the fact that a black person can call a black person a "nigger" without it being the same as a white person calling a black person a "nigger."  Or a Jew can tell Jewish jokes that nonJews would be well-advised to not tell.

As a non-native speaker of French, I would personally not try to innovate the French language much, and, the vast majority of the time, would try to conform to the proper standards, insofar as I reasonably can.  Of course, you are free to offend the French as much as you wish to do.


Second, "aluminum" is correctly spelled and pronounced by many Americans, according to Oxford:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defini...h/aluminum

You can hear it pronounced there if you click on the little symbol next to the written pronunciation.

And notice, Oxford indicates that it is a different pronunciation for British English (as well as a different spelling as you note):

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defini.../aluminium

The fact that American English is different from British English does not make either wrong.  Both have evolved since America was started.  And according to scholarly research, in some ways, the British have altered the language more than the Americans have:

The differences between American and British are not due to Americans changing from a British standard. American is not corrupt British plus barbarisms. Rather, both American and British evolved in different ways from a common sixteenth-century ancestral standard. Present-day British is no closer to that earlier form than present-day American is. Indeed, in some ways present-day American is more conservative, that is, closer to the common original standard than is present-day British.

Some examples of American conservatives versus British innovation are these: Americans generally retain the r-sound in words like more and mother, whereas the British have lost it. Americans generally retain the ‘flat a’ of cat in path, calf, class,whereas the British have replaced it with the ‘broad a’ of father. Americans retain a secondary stress on the second syllable from the end of words like secretary and dictionary, whereas the British have lost both the stress and often the vowel, reducing the words to three syllables, ‘secret’ry’. Americans retain an old use of the verb guess to mean ‘think’ or ‘suppose’ (as in Geoffrey Chaucer’s catch-phrase ‘I gesse’). Americans have retained the past participle form gotten beside got, whereas the British have lost the former. (The British often suppose that Americans use only gotten, in fact they use both, but with different meanings: ‘I’ve got a cold’ = ‘I have a cold’ and ‘I’ve gotten a cold’ = ‘I’ve caught a cold’). Americans retain use of the subjunctivein what grammarians call ‘mandative’ expressions: ‘They insisted that he leave,’ whereas the British substituted for it other forms, such as ‘that he should leave’ or ‘that he left’.

http://www.pbs.org/speak/ahead/change/ruining/

The idea that Americans have bastardized the English language is just silly propaganda that has more to do with bitterness over losing the colonies than it has truth to it.

Oxford is right in their dictionaries about "aluminum" and "aluminium."  Both are correct, though the one is correct in Britain, and the other is correct in the U.S.  In many cases with words in English, different spellings and pronunciations are correct in the same place.


I believe that there are differences between French as spoken in France versus French as spoken in Québec, for the same reasons.  Languages evolve, and when they are evolving in relatively isolated areas, they tend to diverge.  Modern communication is helping to reunite languages, as Americans are both influenced by British TV and films, and the British are influenced by American TV and films.  And, of course, there is also such mutual influence with Australia, New Zealand, Canada (which, being close to the U.S., is and has been more like the U.S. than the others tend to be), and other places where English is spoken, which communicate with each other in the modern world.

Good response!! (And very useful article.)

But I have to warn you... you're starting to sound an awful lot like you're justifyin' EVILution.

(Actually, I wrote a very fun paper for one of my English 102 course requirements, documenting how language evolves in almost the exact same way as genes flow within a population. Prof was fascinated, but only gave me an A- because it was my major, and I "should have picked something I had to entirely research". Which is funny, because the research I did for that paper, on the non-biology linguistics side led me to the works of Noam Chomsky, who remains one of my favorite historical writers; he began his career as a linguist).