Well there are a few occurences in LimeWire resources where the british orthographu could be used: "colour" instead of "color" is an example.
However, I was told that "center" should be kept in British English when it means "middle" or is a verb (conjugated : "centers", "centered", not: "centres", "centred"), whilst "centre(s)" being used exclusively for names of buildings, places in a city, organisations or institutions.
For the historic origin of the English language,it is certainly in Britain, but it was born from a melting pot of other languages, including Latin, Normand, Celtic, Old French, Saxon, and Scandinavian Nordic languages. US English continues that evolution with additional european origins (with a raising influence of American Spanish) and with historic African languages in the Afroamerican community, and more simplifications necessary for mutual understanding of people with various origins (and today with words borrowed worldwide, including East-Asia).
In UK, evolutions include more words from an important South-Asian community, and Celtic languages in Ireland and Scotland.
French also borrowed lot of words from Italian, Russian, German, and Arabic (and today from English), but also historically from regional oil and oc dialects (including Normand in the North of France and Occitan in the South). In Canada, some historical French terms and expressions are kept more frequently (and this is a marvelous source of the French vocabulary because mny ofthesewords are beautiful), but some local usage favor English terms that are not used in France. The influence is reciprocal, and in fact the regionalisms are shading out, with the exception of spoken accents between America and Europe (but a mostly common orthography and syntax).
The same is true with English whose unification is much more visible today than it was only 50 years ago (regionalisms were very present even in UK only, with very distinctive accents).
Last edited by verdyp; February 12th, 2006 at 06:57 AM.
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