>. I was hoping that people could come here with their English version/dialect problems Well, sure; and I will add my twopenno'th below; but the name of this game seems to be lateral thinking (says he, with even less mileage on his posting-clock than Max) and this is one of the most attractive features of awad, surely? I'm not sure if it is because resppondents to this board are all of galactic intellect or because we mostly have the concentration spans of the average gnat, but who cares anyway? It's stimulating, it's fun, it's good to meet fellow-maniacs and I've heard a rumour that the first one to post 5,000 gets a fortnight's holiday in Scunthorpe. (I guess Scunthorpe, England, is similar to Scranton, USA, if what I've geard is correct)
As to the vagaries of the English Language: my sister-in-law teaches ESL in Canada, where they have immigrants from all over the world. Those who come in from the Carribean (Ex-British West Indies islands, that is) insist that they do not need to learn English as a Second Language and get quite upset about it, claiming, with complete justice, that they already speak English. However, their fashion of speech and pronunciation, together with their idiosyncratic idioms, leads to mutual incomprehensibility between them and their hosts. There was no doubt that they needed a conversion course.
The problem has been solved diplomatically by calling the course for Caribbeans, "English as a Second Dialect."
Interestingly, in British towns where there is a large Caribbean population, many of the residents from both communities are bi-lingual (bi-dialectical?? maybe not!)
My children and their friends, West Indian and European, would speak as easily in Jamaican patois as with a Northampton accent, when they were young, depending on whose house they were playing in at the time. Adults tended not to
use the accent of the other communtiy, but understood it readily enough most of the time.
