You're right, Harry, the lexical and idiomatic differences between British and American English variants are better known than the grammatical differences. And the grammatical differences extend far beyond the singular and plural uses of collective nouns (American 'the government is' vs. British 'the government is' and 'the government are', depending). They also include:
- Definiteness of generic references: 'go to hospital' BrE vs. 'go to the hospital' AmE
- Inflected and periphrastic comparatives: 'commoner' BrE vs. 'more common' AmE
And I am sure there are others.
Merle
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora@lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of Harold Somers
Sent: Friday, November 3, 2006 2:47 AM
To: CORPORA@UIB.NO
Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter
It would be a grave mistake to think that the only difference between
British and American English is a few wayward spellings. There are
considerable and extensive lexical, grammatical and idiomatic
differences. The 1st and 3rd of those are more or less well known, but
the grammatical differences never cease to surprise me. I'd be
moderately interested to see what other examples corpora listers come up
with (though no doubt they will also remind me that there are
significant differences in usage between American dialects, not to
mention Canadian etc)
To give just one example of each:
Lift vs elevator
Have you got vs do you have
Half four vs 4:30
Harold Somers
> -----Original Message-----
> >
> > Martin Krallinger wrote:
> >
> >> Dear all,
> >>
> >> I was looking for some simple tool (preferable in Python) which is
> >> able to do automatic conversion of texts (or words) from British
> >> English (UK) to American (US) English and vice versa.
> >> (Example: realize <-> realise)
> >>
> >> This seems to be an easy task, but I could not find any
> ready to use
> >> stand alone tool capable of performing this task.
> >>
> >> I want to integrate this application into an Information
> extraction
> >> system which handles scientific literature.
> >>
> >> I am also interested in references where aspects related to US/UK
> >> English spelling has been analyzed in the context of information
> >> extraction, text mining and terminology extraction.
> >>
> >> Best regards,
> >>
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
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