资源描述:
《english language american or british本科学位论文.doc》由会员上传分享,免费在线阅读,更多相关内容在学术论文-天天文库。
1、English Language: American or BritishBeing the paternal language of the other native Englishes (Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English), British English and American English today are the two main English languages
2、 of the English-speaking world. Although too many has already been said over how the scope, the types, and the possible effects of the inconsistency between the two kinds will be in the future, the quarrel on the issue has not come to an end at all.The cover
3、of the journal Forum XXVII, No 3, July 1989, recalling the topic and provides a research of evidence of the difference between the two kinds of English over the centuries. Noah Webster (in Dissertations on the English Language) claimed that a further incompat
4、ibility of the American language from the English necessary and inevitable. He also predicted that “North American English would eventually be as different from British as Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from German or from one another”. Mark Twain (in The Stol
5、en White Elephant) thought American and British English to be different languages and declared that the former, spoken “in its utmost purity”, cannot be understood by an English people at all. This attitude was previously expressed by Captain Thomas Hamilton
6、(in Men and Manners in America). He said that “in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.”Authors of the twentieth century hold entirely different attitude toward those of the previous centuries, they
7、 tend to have a much more distinctive feeling of sameness between American and British English. Thus, Mitford M. Mathews (from Beginnings of American English) sees the two kinds to be “so overwhelmingly alike.” For Stephen Leacock (from How to Write), “There
8、is not the faintest chance of there ever being an American language as apart from English.” Randolph Quirk (in The New York Times Magazine), believes that, ”even in matters of pronunciati