Introduction main part

BrE- He is in hospital. (BrE- a patient)
AmE- He is in the hospital. (BrE- other than a
patient)
BrE- He is at university.
AmE- He is at the university.
(Tottie in Md. Faruquzzaman, 2017)
Bin Zhang (2008) said that Most phrases of British
English have articles, while those of American English do not
have. The “the” in the standard expressions in British “all the
afternoon”, “all the winter”, “all the week”, “this time of the
year”, etc. are usually omitted in AmE. For examples:
The swimming pools are open all summer
I will be here all afternoon
He has gone all week
(Bin Zhang, 2008)
British English will use articles in front of “sickness”
and “river”, while AmE does not. For example, British English
expresses in the form of “the measles”, “the mumps”, “the
flu”, “the Niagara Falls” and “Black Creek”, while AmE says
“measles”, “mumps”, “flu”, “Niagara Falls” and “Black Creek”.
However, there are exceptions. In some expressions, BrE
does not use articles, while AmE does.
Vocabulary Differences
Lexicon or vocabulary is a central linguistic area where are
noticeable differences between BrE and AmE. Milward in Ashraf
Abdel (2018) suggests that the three main semantic areas where
there are differences between BrE and AmE English are food,
clothing and transportation. The vagaries of fashion have caused
divergence in the of clothing. The many differences in the
terminology of transportation result from the fact that the railroad
(British “railway”) and motorcar industries, developed after the
separation of the United States and Great Britain.
Therefore, the following tables show some examples
regarding the differences in vocabulary between BrE and AmE.
British Council and Bin Zhang (2008) add some vocabularies
on their site’s article that have some differences between AmE and
BrE, here are the samples:
The first complete America’s Dictionary has been
accomplished in 1828 by a lawyer and lexicographer named Noah
Webster. He argued briefly that English in America is different with
English in Britain (Nurhendi, 2016).
The following example are several differences vocabulary between
Ame and BrE:
Paga Tri Barata,
American and British English are clearly one language. But also just as
clearly, they are distinct varieties of that language. The distinction befween
the varieties is least obvious in grammar. It is most salient in pronunciation,
and particularly intonation. But it is greatest in vocabulary: the forms and uses
of words.
This paper examines some ways British is distinct from American for three
semantic fields in words beginning with the letter e. A few comments about
these qualifications limiting the scope of the paper are in order.
First, the corpus for this paper is limited to words with the initial letter e,
including all such words in the combined files of Allen Walker Read and John
and Adele Algeo. Allen Walker Read collected about 100,000 citations of British uses from the eighteenth century to the 1960s. Read's citations include
notably comments by English visitors to America and American visitors to
England, concerning the odd uses of the foreign land in which they found
themselves.
My wife and I have been collecting contemporary citations of Briticisms
since the 1960s and now have more than 50,000. In these combined corpuses,
there are more than a thousand Briticisms beginning with e, which is a large
enough number to serve as the basis for some conclusions, but not so large as
to be daunting for the present purpose. It is also a corpus currently being
investigated by my student, Susan Wright Sigalas, for her doctoral dissertation
at the University of Georgia.
Second, the corpus consists of Briticisms and so the focus of this paper is on
how British differs fromAmerican, not the reverse. British andAmerican English define each other: what is British is what is notAmerican, and vice versa.
The usual approach in British-American studies is to assume British English as
a norn and to look at the ways American departs from it. This approach,
generally unacknowledged, has been practically universal in scholarly studies.
Only a few popular works have taken the opposite or a more balanced stand.
For example, the Oxford English Dictionary, undeniably the greatest of
scholarly works on the history of the English vocabulary labels Americanisms, Australianisms, Canadianisms, Indianisms, New Zealandisms, Scotticisms, South Africanisms, West Indianisms, and so on. However, it has no
146 JohnAlgeo
labels for Briticisms, the usage of England. The unspoken assumption in the
OED is that anything used in England is English pure and simple, and that
anything used only outside England is something else, a variation of core
English. Such an assumption is pardonable in a dictionary intended only for
domestic use within England, but is unacceptable in a work that pretends to
general international relevance.
A language is not located in a landscape or in a political entity such as a
nation. It is located in the brains and on the tongues of its speakers. English is
thus to be found wherever English-speakers are. And English-speakers are
found all over the world. Since a majority of native speakers of English are'
however, now in the United States, it is not completely unreasonable to regard
the American variety as the norm of the language and to study minority varieties with reference to it.
Such a view may not appeal to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, for
whom architectural and linguistic rectitude appear to be matters of greater
concern than some other norms of behavior. Nor will it appeal to those for
whom the export of British English is a significant industry or those who have
invested heavily in it. However, the approach taken here is to see how British
differs from the norm of American.
Third, the terms "British" and "Briticism" hele refer to the standard use of
English in England. They are not ideal terms for that purpose but are used for
lack of better ones. The polysemy of the wotd Englisft refening on the one
hand to the English language in all of its pied beauty and on the other hand to
the geographical area of England encourages confusion.
What counts here as a Briticism is any usage associated specifically with
England by label or definition in dictionaries or any usage identified as a
British varietal distinction by Britons or Americans. Some of the words so
counted may not be Briticisms by some other criteria, but the definition used
here is a purely operational one.
Fourth, the semantic fields into which the Briticisms were classified are
a-posteriori ones, derived from an inspection of the corpus. Initially 73 such
fields were used to classify the corpus of Briticisms; they were of considerable
variation in size, ranging from a single word to about 60 in a field. Those
semantic fields included law, crime, politics, social classes, royalty, derogation, entertainment, sports, communication, animals, plants, occupations, and
so on. Other fields and other assignments of words to fields would be easily
possible, any such classification being to some extent arbitrary'
Because of time and space limitations, I have here restricted attention to
three of the more populous semantic fields: education, food, and transportation. ³The appendix lists nearly 150 Briticisms beginning with the letter e in
these three semantic fields. Following are brief comments on the fields and
selected items in them.
American and British words 1,47
One of the largest areas of semantic differentiation is education. That is not
surprising. The older British systems of elementary preparatory, and university education were not carried over intact to America, where new systems
were instead developed to meet the social and geographical needs of the new
land. Postgraduate education, when it developed in America, followed a German rather than a British model. And so there was from the beginning a sharp
hiatus between educational practice in the New World and that in Britain, a
hiatus intensified by the recent independent development in Britain andAmerica of universal education on all levels. There is today, to be sure, a great deal
of mutual influence, but the historical divergence has produced many differences in practice and thus in the vocabulary for talking about that practice.
Much of the terminological difference befween British andAmerican educational matters therefore reflects differences in the things named. Names for the
divisions of the academic year in Britain reflect the ecclesiastical origins of
British education: terms such as Christmas, Easter Michaelmas, HiIary (commemorating an otherwise obscure French saint), Lent, and Trinity. American
academic terms are distinctly duller, more prosaic, and more secularfall, winte4 spring, summer. The use of seasonal names (which are not unknown in
Britain but compete with the more churchy alternatives) is a reminder that the
American academic calendar was created to allow children to be out of school
when they were most needed for farm chores, an anomaly today.
The system of English external examinations, by which faculty at one university write and grade tests for students at another university, is foreign to
American education. The American analog is the national examination provided by a private testing company, but it is a distant analog. Even the term for
the basic artifact of the examination is different: British examination paper is
not used in America, where the term is simply examination, exam) or test, ot
for its reciprocal aspects: questions and answers.
Food is another area of extensive lexical differentiation between American
and British use. Although earthnut has been an English word since AngloSaxon times, the plant is not native to America, so the first colonists did not
need the name for it, and the term dropped out of use on the western side of the
Atlantic. When the peanut spread to Britain, the term earthnut was sometimes
extended to it there, but America had enough native terms for that food, inchtding peanut itself and the geographically more limited Africanisms goober
(pea) and pinder. Thus an ancient English term, earthnut, has become a twofold Briticism, fust by being lost from American English through lack of its
original referent and second by being innovatively applied in British English
to a new referent for whichAmerican already had other terms.
Endive is a particularly complex example. Also known as escarole, it comes
in several varieties with leaves of variable width and curliness, used as a salad
ingredient. The related plant chicory, also called succory or, to add to the
L48 JohnAlgeo
confusion, Belgian endive, is cultivated by blanching its crown leaves for use
also as a salad ingredient, when it is sometimes called witloof ot French en'
dive.To sort out the use of the names for these plants, both Britons andAmericans have often been advised that the terms endive and chicory are used in
opposite ways in their two countries, so they should simply reverse what they
"utt
ttt" things when they are traveling in partibus infidelibus. That advice is
too simple. Americans, however, do tend to reserve chicory for the ground root
ofthe piant as a coffee substitute and use endive generally for the salad ingredient, whatever its botanical identity.
Other differences in food terms are due to British innovation. Egg mayonnaise,happily unknown inAmerica as either a term or a food, suggests a French
culinary dtju:te,neri:/ or anglicb /'krlinerif model. Neither it nor itsAmerican
anutog,
"gg
r alad, are listed in general dictionaries; yet neither is semantically
transparent, and thus both neglected terms need lexicographical treatment.
E[g cup is another Briticism. This article of crockery was generally unknown in nineteenth-century America. lnstead, when Americans ate softboiled
eggs, they broke them into an ordinary cup or a wine glass, added seasoning,
and stirred up the mixture'
In L833, u gritirh traveler in America made an observation about this (to
him) peculiar American custom that many of his fellow countrymen echoed:
,,Wine-glasses are placed on the breakfast table in lieu of egg-cups. On enquiry, we learned from the waiter, that this is the universal custom, and that the
Americans never eat an egg direct from the shell, but pour the contents into a
wine-glass, in which they mix it up with salt before tasting it'"
A generation later, an American traveling in England and staying at a London hotel in 1867 made a complementary observation: "The eggs were
brought in [for breakfast] ... in egg-cups, with the shells unbroken, not broken
into a glass as was the invariable practice in America' I was astonished to see
the egg thus eaten out of the eggshell." The term e88 cup, which is still rare in
America, as is its referent, is a Briticism.
Some terms change their status, and do so quite rapidly. Espresso,both term
and thing, was new to English in the 1940s. It seems to have entered British
English first andAmerican afterwards, whether directly from Italian or by way
of British is not clear. It is general English today. But in the 1940s it appears to
have been a Briticism.
It is not surprising that transportation terms should vary, since the normal
modes of transportation have changed radically since the political and cultural separation of America and Britain. The two areas of greatest contrast are
automoiive and railroading terms. Automotive terms, for cars, trucks, busses,
and the road, are doubtless the most salient of contrasting transportation
words.
Some automotive differences are obvious and so well known as to be
American and British words 1,49
shibboleths of British-American difference: British estate car for American
station wagon is a case in point. Others are subtler. The use of engage in
collocation with gear is a Briticism; Americans do not usually "engage a
gear"; instead they "put it in gear" or "put it in fust, second, third, high, reverse, etc." or they "shift gears."
Engage (of a gear) is understandable to an American, but belongs to the
wrong register for most car-talk. A passage like the following, from an Anthony Price thriller, would be impossible in American detective fiction: "'I'll
be off then.'He engaged the gear and released the defective hand-brake to suit
his words." An American analog might go something like this: "'I'm outta
here.' He put the car in gear and took off the bum parking brake, to show he
wasn't just flapping his gums." (Engage is generally more popular and less
formal in British than inAmerican. [n addition to gears, British telephones and
public toilets are often engaged, uses that are faintly comic to an American
sensibility, which prefers busy and occupied, respectively.)
Railroading language is obsolescent for mostAmericans, with the demise of
the national rail system, replaced by passenger cars and trucks on interstate
highways and by air travel especially for longer distances. American railroading terms are consequently nearly as foreign to most Americans as are their
British equivalents, so the contrast is rapidly becoming one between British
terminology and no terms at all.
Even before the dismantling of the American train system, some of the
traditional differences had ceased to be valid. In the heyday of the railroads, an
often cited contrast was between British engine and American locomotive,but
by the first third of this century the British alternative had been naturalized in⁴
American English.
There are fewer differences in aviation, doubtless because it is highly international by nature. There is also a good deal of fluctuation in both British and
American aviation terminology, for example, the terms for various classes of
service (first class versus economy, tourist, excursion, or simply an unnamed
"all others"). The airlines strive to find a set of terms that will distinguish firstclass seats from "all others" without making those who are the "all others" feel
like what they are-second-class travelers.
For all semantic categories, an interesting factor is the extent to which Briticisms, as operationally defined here, are recorded in the OED. As already
observed, the OED does not label Briticisms, but in addition, it does not even
enter a goodly number. About 39 percent of the Briticisms examined here have
entries, main or subordinate, inthe OED. Another 9 percent are exemplified
somewhere in the text of the OED, in quotations or definitions for other entries, but have no entries of their own. Thus 52 percent of these Briticisms are
not in the OED at all and 61 percent have no entry in that work.
The reasons for the omission from the OED of over half the Briticisms
150 JohnAlgeo
examined here are fairly clear. Many such terms would have been considered
by the OED editors to be free combinations or contextualized semantic variants rather than independent lexicalized forms. Although Munay and his colleagues were generous in including what they regarded as free combinations
and finely distinguished semantic categories, the number of candidates for
such inclusion is very large. It is impossible in practice to include all in any
dictionary, so the lexicographer has to rely on the competence of the native
speaker to identify more or less predictable uses.
However, what seems to a native speaker of British English to be a predictable use may not seem so to the speaker of another variety, such as American. Early tea (which does not have an OED entry) may seem to a British
speaker to be obvious and therefore not needing a definition, but no American uninitiated into the mysteries of British mealtimes would have any notion
of what it is. Similarly, egg soldier is transparent to someone who knows
about the soldiers that are strips of bread and what they are used for, but not
to ignorant Americans. A single word that falls into the same category is excess for what Americans would call "overtime" or "violation" on a parking
meter, as in excess charge and excess flag. Such extended use of excess may
seem to be obvious to British speakers, but it is a pruzlement to others