[Ti] word pronunciation/spelling (seriously OT)

[Erika]

if expecting a reply, please note my signature, which contains clarification of my
peculiar circumstances.
John Griffin spake thus:
<snip>
>I have often wondered about this. Being Canadian, I always consciously
>change the spellings to American when I am writing to an American audience.
>But normally we spell the same way as in the UK. I use the UK dictionaries
>in all my applications and am informed that every time I change words from
>the Canadian (UK) to American, I have created a misspelling. It can be very
>confusing to do this on the fly.

I wouldn't bother if I were you. Americans make no concessions to our spelling
preferences that I've ever noticed. We are exposed to their spelling all the time, so I
don't suppose it would do any harm to retun the compliment ;-).

Look at our 'localised UK English' systems for a joke; Every other language from
Swedish to Japanese gets its own language localisation, but we are stuck with 'trash'
instead of 'dustbin', 'favorites' instead of 'favourites', 'done' instead of
'finished', 'mail' instead of 'post', 'OK' instead of 'All Right', 'disk' instead of
'disc', not to mention most of the application developers (even some European ones)
following suit and adding other Americanisms of their own such as verbs ending in 'ize'
instead of 'ise'. I got so sick of it that I used to hack the string resources on all
my previous systems, and had 'compost heap' for 'trash' for instance, but I found that
if I added a 'u' to 'favorites', things broke. Must have been a directory path issue, I
suppose. I don't know *nix well enough yet to try the same thing on with OS X.
Directory paths seem to be so much more rigid...

I heard once that Apple did put out a short-lived "UK English localised' system with a
'wastebasket' or something for a 'trash', but dumped it for some reason. I wonder what
the combined population of all the UK/Commonwealth english-speaking nations is,
compared with the population of, say, Sweden...
>
>However, we are a strange mixture. We put Gas in our cars, not Petrol and we
>drive on Tires, not Tyres, and the cars (autos) have Trunks and Hoods, not
>Boots and Bonnets. We sit on Couches, not Chesterfields and we have Aluminum
>Powerbooks, not Aluminium.

We sit on sofas or lounges <g> and blissfully put petrol and tyres in and on our cars,
luggage in our boots, and look nervously under our bonnets when our cars break down,
and we have (or I thought we had) Titanium (or should that be 'Titanum'<g>) PowerBooks,
sit on our arses or bums, not our asses (unless we own donkeys as several of my
neighbours do), when we get pissed it means we're drunk, not angry, when we're mad it
means we're crazy, not angry. On the other hand, my mother was Canadian, and her
english was more english than mine...so there you go. She was an english teacher
though...

   best,
   
   Erica Mackenzie
   Megalong Valley, N.S.W.
   AUSTRALIA

  N.B. Please do not be surprised or annoyed if I fail to answer your post for
  some time. I have a fluctuating chronic auto-immune neurological condition,
  and am sometimes unable to use my computer for long periods (weeks or months).
  Be assured that I will reply as soon as I can - if I can. Please be tolerant.

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