介绍:
Heyang: Hello everyone! 欢迎来到这周的Round Table英语词汇小百科，我是Heyang。今天我和Mark要来聊一聊英式英语和美式英语的区别。So Today we are gonna talk about the differences between British English versus American English, and we will focus on, I guess, vocabulary.
Mark: Yes, that’s right. Of course there are lots of differences between British English or World English as I call it. For historical reasons of the British Empire and so forth, British English is actually very very wide spread in India for example, a country with a population in excess of 1.1 billion people. Very extensively throughout many English speaking African countries where it’s one of the official languages, Australia of course and Canada, so it’s kind of like America versus the world. Hollywood should make a movie about it, shouldn’t they really? But they don’t have to, because they make every movie in American English, which acts as a real sort of force for American culture generally. And of course there’s also Microsoft word spellchecker which by default checks in American English, so that’s how American English is spreading around the world mainly, I think, these days.
Heyang: I suppose so. I think Mark and myself Heyang, we are the perfect people to talk about this topic. Let’s set the scene a little bit here. A porter in a British hotel comes upon an American tourist impatiently jabbing at the button for the lift.
Mark: Madam, the lift will be here in a moment.
Heyang: Lift?
Mark: Replies the American.
Heyang: Oh, you mean the elevator.
Mark: No madam, here we call it the lift.
Heyang: Well, as it was invented in the United States, it’s called an elevator.
Mark: Yes madam, but as the English language was invented here, it’s called a lift.
Heyang: Well done!
Mark: That was fun, wasn’t it?
Heyang: That was fun! Well, I think that sets a pretty good tone of today’s discussion.
Mark: Can I just say something about that little sketch we did? It’s not true to say that the lift was invented in the United States, because do you know that two thousand years ago in ancient Rome, there were lifts then, mechanically operated lifts.
Heyang: Well, there you go, there’s a fact of triviality that would be useful for our listeners. Americans say crosswalk and what British people say?
Mark: We would say zebra crossing. That’s great, isn’t it? Because it looks like a zebra, the black and white rectangular sections across the road for you to cross in safety, so we call it a zebra crossing.
Heyang: It sounds more visual, the British version. But for the American version, this is describing the path for crossing road that traffic lights, so it’s kind of straightforward too. It’s coming from different angles.
Mark: This is the thing I don’t really like when people speak of American English versus British English. Actually, it could be argued that American is a dialect of English really, because Americans enrich the English language, as do British people as well. And also of course, so to Chinese people, there are words that have been created here in China before the English language. Procuratorate, for some sort of judicial building or office, is a word, as far as I know only exists here in China. It’s been added to the English language by the Chinese.
Heyang: And also academicians, 院士. That’s probably something that’s very Chinese.
Mark: Why do these Chinese created English words, why they are so hard to pronounce? I would hate to have to say something like “the academician made his way to the procuratorate.”
Heyang: Oh my god! That sounds like a major tongue twister. Ok, Let’s go to another one, soda. It refers to anything like Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew and all those kind of things.
Mark: We call that fizzy drink, fizzy means something with bubbles in it, carbonated, is a more technical word. We call that fizzy drink. There are other things as well, foods and vegetables like eggplant, for example.
Heyang: That’s American, right?
Mark: Yes, we call eggplant aubergine, which is actually a French word, because of Britain’s proximity to France, and because of the invasion by the Northern French a thousand years ago. There are huge French influences in England and in English language as well, and that’s one of them--aubergine.
Heyang: Yes, I think Language is a very interesting subject, and it’s a truly democratic form in so many ways. Let’s go to the last one that is erasure. What do you guys call it?
Mark: We call that a rubber.
Heyang: Well, that means completely different things in the United States.
Mark: What it means, Heyang?
Heyang: Ok, I’m just goona say it. Rubber means condom in America.
Mark: Be careful with what y ou ask for, when you going to the stationery store, you mention that language is a very democratic thing, I kind of thought to myself, I’ll tell you I thought, what does she mean by that when you said that, but actually you are absolutely right. But first of all, I thought people don’t vote for language, but they do actually by using it when we hear a buzzword or something. By simply using it and repeating it, we are voting for it. So that’s a very good description of language actually.
Heyang: Thank you very much. I don’t get that many compliments from you Mark. That’s all the time we have for this edition of word of the week. See you next week!
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