Which "version" of English do you have installed?

[oshunluvr]

I'm not really looking for help - just noticed something wrong this morning and wondered if anyone else is seeing this.

I was typing a post here (where else? ) and misspelled "matter" by missing a "t" leaving "mater." Mater did not display as misspelled. Thus I guessed (correctly) that British English was on my system. Turns out so was Australian English (they have their own version?) and even South African English but not American English.

Now, I have nothing against our neighbors across the pond (hello Feathers!) or Down Under or Charlize (helloooo there!) and her fellow Afrikaners, but I speak Good Ol' U S of A English. A simple removal of myspell-en-au, ...-gb, and ...-za and installing ...-us fixed it.

I have no clue as to why or when this happened, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't always this way. I must have missed the change over somewhere.

[Feathers McGraw]

Interesting!

We don't spell matter (atoms etc.) with one t though?

Mater is mother in latin... maybe you have latin installed? Hehe.

My system is set up to use British english, and American english is also installed... weird that you didn't have it by default. Pretty sure it was auto-detected during the setup wizard (from the keyboard layout I think?). You don't/didn't have any funky keyboards attached to your machine do you?

When did you install? Mine was a double do-release-upgrade from 13.10.

[claydoh]

It is just a conspiracy to get us yanks to spell like they do. I plan to fight it.
When I eventually make it Down Under, I will be a weirdo and flat refuse to say "Al-you-min-ee-um".

[Feathers McGraw]

This is interesting, I always assumed you bunch of troublemakers changed it from its original name, but it seems its inventor was just indecisive.

The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy...

Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at first spelling it alumium (this was in 1807) then changing it to aluminum, and finally settling on aluminium in 1812. His classically educated scientific colleagues preferred aluminium right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in –ium, like potassium, sodium, and magnesium, all of which had been named by Davy.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm

[Snowhog]

Well, that just goes to show that his "classically educated scientific colleagues" were just a bunch of lemmiums.

[MoonRise]

What Browser? I can say I've always have had that issue in FireFox and no matter what I did it always defaulted to English-GB. Chrome does not do that though. It has English-US by default.

[Rod J]

Greetings from Down Under.

I just checked my settings in FIrefox and it was set to English/United States ... I was surprised to say the least! I quickly added "proper" English/New Zealand and made it the default.

Seriously though, I can't imagine many web pages offering English/New Zealand as an alternative.

[SteveRiley]

"proper" English/New Zealand

You mean like this?

[jlittle]

"proper" English/New Zealand

You mean like this?

Peck...................to file a suitcase ...

That guide to NZ speech is to a Sydney ear, and captures nothing of the whiny nasal quality of kiwi vowels (it also gives what's called "broad" kiwi, spoken by about half of us in Nu Zilund, the rest say Niu Zeelind).
In the phrase "When merry Mary marries" all the stressed vowels are nasalized, and are identical. (Thanks to a Scottish father and age for me they're all quite different.)

[Rod J]

@Steve

Thanks for that! Really good pronunciation table

@John
My parents were both Scottish so I can hear some of our odd pronunciations at times (they certainly did). It does make me cringe sometimes when I hear some famous NZ'ers on TV e.g. John Key and Helen Clark have REAL Kiwi accents.

[SteveRiley]

That guide to NZ speech is to a Sydney ear

I've spent a fair amount of time in Auckland (plus a little in Wellington and Christchurch). That table captures the NZ sound to my American ear, as well.

Helen Clark have REAL Kiwi accents.

She was always such a joy to listen to...

[ronw]

Go to the source for all things New Zealand. Flight of the Conchords:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy1cOn5vGc4

[Tom_ZeCat]

I've fixed Firefox several times by simply deleting the non-American dictionaries. However, whenver there's an update that includes Firefox, it seems to default back to UK English. No big deal; I just delete the unneeded dictionaries again.

I first noticed this when "anymore" was flagged as spelled wrong. In US-English, "anymore" should be spelled as one word if it means "any longer." I don't think the Brits or the Aussies do it that way. (But they're wrong, of course. American English is right. )