Juggling Vocabulary and regional terminology - Day 5

I just thought of another analogy. I can fill out and sometimes complete crossword puzzles for American audiences. I have limited success with the Monday & Tuesday NYT crossword puzzles. What about British crosswords? I doubt it. While I watch tons of British TV shows and reads lots of British novels, I doubt I can connect clues with British terminology. And forget about the cultural references and slang, although I do know that calling someone (on the phone) is to “give them a bell”, and “bin it” means toss it out. While I get the reference, there’s too much lost in translation to shift my brain around to British English. In the same breath, I realize the Brits probably say the same about Americans. Isn’t it amazing how much English varies among all the Anglo/English speaking countries!

Writing using a Patois, slang, or mimicking “dialect,” a term out of vogue today. Written phonetically, or in the language of a different era, for example Shakespeare that hasn’t been edited for a modern reader: Chaucer is another example – written in Middle English. If you hear out loud, you can often parse them meaning without understand the dialect.

Think of books where the editor left in local or regional idiom. You’ll see this in books written in English for different English-speaking (Anglophone?) countries: Australia / New Zealand, Canada, US, England, Scotland, Ireland, and even India.  Sometimes an editor or copy editor with shift spelling from British to American English, dropping those u’s or c’s for s’s.

Think back to when the Harry Potter series was first published. Editors, or perhaps the publisher, printed books for American / Canadian audiences and for British readers. Alternative titles and different spelling and vocabulary made the editions different, particularly Harry’s first adventure Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997) aka Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Why did they do it? Perhaps it was too confusing for the intended audience of young(ish) readers. Personally, I don’t think the teens would have noticed the difference. Then again, young readers (six and up) are now consuming the Harry Potter series, so perhaps the editors were correct. From personal experience, I was reading books intended for young British readers by the time I was nine. I don’t think I noticed a difference in spelling or vocabulary, although I was and still am a person who looks up unfamiliar words. I’m thinking of books like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.