(GEN) Reviewers Please Read...

Ohhhh damn I should have read that one twice!

Scott

I thought it was a pretty good impersonation of a Texan ;-)

in article snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Scott J at farrier snipped-for-privacy@mchsi.com wrote on 12/14/03 5:26 PM:

Their you go again!

MB Ausitn TX

in article Xns9451B4526967Fslargebucketirvaniac@199.224.117.11, David Ferris at snipped-for-privacy@irvania.com wrote on 12/14/03 4:43 PM:

About the only time an apostrophe is used to denote a plural is in figures and letters "...dot the I's or there were five 6's." Other than that, apostrophes indicate the omission of letters, as in contractions, or to show possession.

MB

Shouldn't that be "Thar ya go agin"?

:-)

Tom

I didn't know that one, but I looked it up in my text book and there it is. It does say that it should only be used where the text would be ambiguous without it, so I probably wouldn't use it in the case of the

In article , RoofDL writes

Does the waiver apply to those of us who are from England but who's native tongue is a dialect? There was a programme on TV a while ago (early this year, IIRC) trying to see if there was any distinct genetic trace of the various ethnic groups who have historically contributed to the make-up of the British people. IIRC, the only group with a traceable Scandinavian element was from around Penrith, and they had a couple of the older residents conversing on the programme. Translations were provided for the rest of the country!

Cheers,

in article snipped-for-privacy@mb-m05.aol.com, Maiesm72 at snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote on 12/15/03 3:55 PM:

No, that was my Reagan imitation.

MB

I've heard that Yorkshiremen require subtitles. :)

Bill Banaszak, MFE

And cut once.

Bill Banaszak, MFE ;)

We couldn't see the plastic smile. ;)

Bill Banaszak, MFE

A friend of mine used to tell the tale of his short time as a P.O.W. of the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was a member of an ordnance maintenance and repair unit and had been picked up by the Germans in the confusion of von Runstedt's breakthrough. He and a bunch of other guys were kept in a makeshift POW cage built around an old barn and were getting pretty hungry, not to mention cold. About the third afternoon they noticed that most of the guards had disappeared. One of the remaining guards, a guy who looked like about 12 years old with a greatcoat 10 sizes too big for him opened the front gate and walked in and announced "XXX iss Kaput! We go home, Gute Luck!" and turned around and took off. George and the rest of the POW's did the same, going in the other direction. It got dark while they were looking for the allied lines and they blundered into a British unit in the dark. Things got confusing and George got bayoneted in the face before everyone figured out who was who. Seems they were Welsh troops and as George would ruefully comment when examining the piece of bridgework he ended up with as a result, "Goddam Welshmen can't speak English any better than the Krauts can".

Bill Shuey

snipped-for-privacy@rcn.com (Ron) wrote in :

I've wondered about that as well. The people I've heard using it were Africans (whose first language was either French or one of the African languages). I always assumed it was one of those things that are very hard to learn after a certain age (a bit like the Japanese having difficulty pronouncing the R, or my own Dutch origins still being much more noticeable when I speak English, than when I write it).

Curious that some Americans also have problems with pronouncing 'ask'...

snipped-for-privacy@localnet.com (M. J. Rudy) wrote in :

For a moment I thought you'd comment on the use of non-SI units, but alas...

I speak wth a southern American dialect. You ought to give it a try speaking as I do and try talking to your realitives in Sky!

Scott J

snipped-for-privacy@privacy.com (MGFoster) wrote in :

Isn't Zulu from the NATO phonetic alphabet? (and is there a single 'international phonetic alphabet'?)

In that light, try learning to pronounce the "clicks" that are part of some African languages once your're an adult...

And I've encountered quite a few US southerners that can only pronounce "r" as "ar-rah".