America Speaks The Best English

On my last trip to America, USA to be precise, I've heard more Spanish than anything else. In lots of places, the locals couldn't speak English at all.

In a few decades, only a minority will speak English in the USA.

For the moment, I do think an educated American sounds pretty good.

 

Lot's of places...riiight. Now you are just spouting bullshit, and/ or the 'locals' were having some fun with you. Which they are apt to do with gullible white folk.

 

actually no. english is what they speak in england. ameringlish is what they speak in america. they're really NOT the same. they may SOUND the same, or nearly the same. but they're really really not. they can sort of understand each other. almost maybe. the divergence really has reached the point of being quite conspicuous.

 

maybe she ate at a lot of Mexican restaurants

 

new york and L.A. can barely understand each other. why would england and the u.s.?

 

context mnax....Pretty sure thats not what she was talking about.

 

LOL

 

Is themnax an acid casuality or something?

 

Thats an exaggeration and you know it... :daisy:

 

just a reality casualty, who never mastered the christian art of self deception.

 

Does Wales have much of a distinct culture and history? In the US, we read and hear a lot about England, Scotland, and Ireland, but nothing specific about Wales.

 

Take it easy now, the mnax has more wisdom in his pinky toe than you do in your entire...

 

you're kidding, right?
"men of riesling, gird for battle,
enimies are stealing cattle,
more then this, our precious chattle,
our women and our booze"
only in america would anyone pronounce the first c in celtic like an s

(well ok, i suppose the reference is a little esoteric. herlic is the actual stronghold refered to. and i'm sure i'm spelling it wrong. and i suppose i mostly know about it because of the ffestiniog railway, and the society for creative anacronism)

let me put it this way, wales had a cultural history before there was any such place as england.

 

I actually have no idea what you're talking about.

 

just google pre-roman britain, or even just celtic.

i understand though, in america we're not even taught anything about america before the european invasion of the mid 1400s.

 

Welsh and Celtic are the same thing?

I'm familiar with Celtic music, and lots of history and culture attributed directly to England. When it comes to Scotland and Ireland, like most Americans, I know a thing or two about bagpipes, kilts, the Loch Ness legend, violence in Northern Ireland, Irish pubs, and various other items of trivia that have made their way into pop culture. Wales? ... I draw a blank. I don't associate it with anything. I don't remember any literature or history teachers in public school talking about Wales. They talked more about England than all other foreign countries combined.

 

I haven't heard much of Wales either. In America you hear a lot of people lament on their Scottish, English, and Irish ancestry but strangely Wales does not come up very often.

 

welsh is of course a subset of celtic. celtic is iron and bronze age western europe. well of course you're drawing a blank. england doesn't go that far back. la tene was western europe, gundistrop was eastern. both were on the continent. celtic culture migrated to the british isles thousands of years before the saxons and veekings. cimri, the ancient name for wales, is where slate and coal mining developed and a lot of the technologies that coal made possible. the celts developed metal working and brought it to the british isles before any of those later people showed up. this was way before even bodicia vs rome.

well at any rate, english, and later amerenglish, is really a mish mash of all those earlier influences. our alphabet owes more to cimri then to rome.
and that mish mash is why our spellings are so illogical and inconsistant, because there's no majority of words that all evolved in any one place.

 

The Welsh have their own culture and identity which is different from England or Scotland. The Welsh language (which is totally different from both Scots and Irish gaelic) is spoken quite widely in many parts of Wales, and things like road signs are in Welsh first and English second. All Welsh speakers are bi-lingual. Welsh language is taught in schools. The Welsh culture is stronger in north and mid Wales than in the south.

There's a Welsh nationalist movement which isn't as active now as it was few years ago before Wales had it's own national assembly which has control over some of what goes on there, although they are still subordinated to Westminster. At one time, there was a campaign to promote the language which became quite violent. Because the town in which I live is close to the border, there was an arson attack some years ago on the local telephone exchange. There were also incidents of arson on second homes brought up by English people in Wales as holiday residences. It was also common to see road signs etc in English which had been defaced and painted over in Welsh
I was once threatened by Welsh nationalists, with the general message 'go home English'.
But actually they rely a lot on tourism as the economy of much of Wales is agricultural, excepting the south which is now a post-industrial mess. At one time there was a massive amount of coal mining and steel making there, but it's now virtually all gone.

The Welsh, or a lot of them, are quite insular, and wouldn't like to be lumped in with the English.

'Cymru am byth' - Wales forever.

 

Thanks, BBB. I knew you would have a lot of info on this.