The Wal at the Warld's End (an extract)

"There was once a king and a queen, and the king had a dochter and the queen had a dochter. And the king's dochter was bonnie and guid-natured, and a 'body liket her; and the queen's dichter was ugly and ill-natured, and naebody liket her. The queen didna like the king's dochter, and she wanted her awa',

Sae she sent her to the wal at the warld's end, to get a bottle o' water, thinking she would never come back.

Weel, she took her bottle, and she gaed and gaed or ere she cam to pownie that was tethered, and the pownie said to her,

'Flit me, flit me, my bonnie May,

For I haena been flitted this seven years and a day.'

And the king's dochter said, 'Ay will I, my bonnie pownie, 111 flit ye.’ Sae the pownie ga 'e her a ride owre the Muir o 'Heckle-pins.

Weel, she gaed far and far and farer nor I can tell, or ere she cam to the wal at the warld's end; and when she cam to the wal, it was awfu’ deep and she couldna get her bottle dippit. And as she was lookin'doon, thinkin’ hoo to do, there lookit up to her three scaud men's heids, and they said to her,

‘Wash me, wash me, my bonnie May,

And dry me wi 'yer clean linen apron'.

And she said, 'Ay will I; I'll wash ye.'

Sae she washed the three scaud men's heids, and dried them wi’her clean linen apron; and syne they took and dippit her bottle for her.

And the scaud men's heids said, the tone to the tither, ‘Weird, brither, weird, what'll ye weird?' And the first ane said, 'I weird that if she was bon­nie afore, she 'll be ten times bonnier.’ And the second d ane said, ‘I weird that ilka time she speaks, there'll be a diamond and a ruby and a pearl drop oot o’her mouth.’ And the third ane said, ‘I weird that ilka time she kaims her heid, she 'II get a peck o 'gowd and a peek o 'siller oot o 'it.’

Weel, she cam hame to the king's court again, and she was bonnie afore, she was ten times bonnier; and ilka time she opened her lips to speak there was a diamond and a ruby and a pearl drappit oot o'her mouth; and ilka time she kaimed her head, she gat a peck o'gown and a pec k o’siller ooto'it.

The queen was that vexed she didna ken what to do. Sae she sent her ain dochter to see if she could fa' in wi' the same luck. <...>"

Sometimes variations in language use may cause difficulties not only for foreigners, but for native speakers as well. This is often subject to jokes. One of them is the following, describing a conversation among an English­man, an American and a Scotsman:

"Englishman: 'I'll never forget my feelings the first time I had breakfast in America, when the waitress leaned over my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, "Are you through with the cereal?" It was sometime before I discovered that she meant "Have you finished your porridge?"

American: ‘Wal, shortly after I landed in England a waiter came up to me at luncheon and said, "How did you find your chop, sir?" I replied, "Oh I looked behind the potato and there it was ", before I understood that he was asking me how I liked it'.

Scotsman: That's nothing to what happened to me once. I was in ladgings in a small town in the west of Ireland. Half an hour after I had finished my supper, an exceedingly pretty girl came into my room and said, "Will I strip now, sir?" I fled into my bedroom and locked the door, but I found out afterwards that Irish girls always talk about 'stripping the table' when tins mean 'clearing away the dishes "'.

2. The English language is one of more than 5,000 languages in the world. It is used in many countries, so it is far from being entirely uniform There are quite many different kinds of English (= Englishes) in different parts of the world. Some linguists state that there are two main families of Standard English (see the diagram below taken from G. Nesterchuk, 1997:298):

Standard English

American English Family British English Family

• United States - West Indies

• Canada - Britain

- Australia

- Africa

The diagram shows that American English is spoken in the USA and in Canada, while British English is spoken in the West Indies, Britain, Australia and Africa. Besides, English is an official language in India, Northern Ireland, and in other Commonwealth countries.

It is important to know the different ways in which English-speaking communities grew up in various parts of the globe, since these circumstances clearly affected attitudes towards the home country and the mother tongue.

The first settlements in America derived from the motives of commercial expansion and religious refuge (by the way, the original pre-conquest population of North America- up to 12 million people - spoke about 450 distinct languages). Australia was originally settled as a penal colony for transported convicts in order to get them as far away from Britain as possible. British interests in the West Indies were primarily focused on plantations worked by prisoners from Europe and slaves from West Africa. It is clear that the founding populations differed socially. Moreover, the people did not leave Britain at the same time, thus bringing with themselves the English language of different stages in its development. As a rule, the settlers resisted English dominance. Finally, in North America the American-British conflict resulted in the American Declaration of Independence (1776). The conflict had a linguistic consequence in that a new variant of English began to acquire its own identity and independence.

The so-called Englishes differ from their source language in pronunciation and spelling, neutral word-stock and phraseology, and, to a lesser extent, in morphology and syntax. American English is the most developed variety. George Bernard Shaw is said to have made the much quoted remark that "Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language". Oscar Wilde used to say: "We and Americans have much in common but there is always the language barrier".

Some specific features of American English:

in the pronunciation:

• American English intonation does not rise or fall as much as that of British English, it sounds more monotonous;

• American voices usually have a higher pitch (висота звучання, інтенсивність), that is why AmE often seems a bit more emphatic and American voices seem louder than those of British speakers.

• There are certain differences in pronunciation of vowels and consonants. For instance, the British long [a:] is replaced by [æ] in AmE, e.g. classes, lasting, path, dance; the sound [j] is omitted in AmE; produce [prə'du:s], stupid ['stu:pid]; the sound [r] is always pronounced if a word contains this letter: deserve BrE [di'zə:v], AmE [di'zə:rv]; bird BrE [bə:d], AmE [bə:rd].

in spelling:

• A number of words have different spelling in British and American writing.

AmE: BrE:

-or vs -our

honor honour

color colour

rumor rumour

-er vs -re

theater theatre

center centre

liter litre

-og vs -ogue

catalog catalogue

dialog dialogue

-am vs -amme

program programme

-ense vs -ence

defense defence

offense offence

-yze vs -yse

analyze analyse

paralyze paralyse

• other common differences are:

AmE: BrE:

jewelry jewellery

counselor counsellor

gray grey

cozy cosy

draft (wind) draught (wind)

anesthetic anaesthetic

• in the forms of Past Simple and Past Participle of the verbs ending in -l, -m, -me and -p, Americans tend to avoid doubling the final letter, ct.

AmE: traveled BrE: travelled

quarreled quarrelled

programed programmed

diagramed diagrammed

kidnaped kidnapped

worshiped worshipped

in grammar:

• in BrE the noun ox has an irregular ending -en (oxen), but in AmE there are also variant plurals: the regular oxes and the unchanged form ox [Greenbaum, 1996:102];

• in BrE collective nouns (e.g. team, group, class, majority, etc.) usea as focusing on the group as individuals rather than a single entity are treated as plural, while in AmE such nouns, nevertheless, tend to take a singular verb; cf. (BrE) The crowd were in a cheerful mood VS (AmE) The crowd was in a cheerful mood;

• In AmE the verb get has two participles: got and gotten; the tendency is for have got to denote possessing something and have gotten to denote obtaining something.

• In both BrE and AmE the form ain't is a much stigmatized negative present tense form for be and for auxiliary have (e.g. She ain’t angry, I ain 't crying, They ain t done it). However, it is used by politicians to sound simple and informal. They say, President Reagan, upon his re-election in 1984, assured the electorate: You ain't seen nothing yet, using a double negation and a form of words which no British politician would.

• In informal AmE, real and sure ("certainly") are commonly used an intensifies and good and bad as manner adverbs, e.g. I sure don’t want to see him, This homemade lemonade is real good.

• In AmE the form of Past Indefinite is used instead of Present Perfect to express a completed action, e.g. (AmE) I just ate VS (BrE) I have just eaten;

• As to prepositions, Americans prefer round instead of around (round the corner vs around the corner), around instead of about (around a mile vs about a mile), in behalf of instead of on behalf of, on the street vs in the street; ten after ten (time - 10:10) instead of ten past ten (10.10).

in punctuation:

• In both AmE and BrE numerals for abbreviated dates may be sepa­rated either by periods (commonly called 'full stops' in BrE) or by slanting lines (also 'virgules', 'solidi') or by dashes, but the references to day and month are differently ordered in the two varieties. Thus, for instance, the date 10.4.99 (which can also be represented as 10/4/99 or 10-4-99) stands for October 4, 1999 in American English and April 10, 1999 in British English;

• For time abbreviation a full stop is generally used in BrE, while Americans prefer a colon, as in: 9.30 (BrE) and 9:30 (AmE);

• AmE and BrE differ in the use of quotation marks (also "inverted commas") in sentences containing direct speech: in BrE, the closing punctuation mark is placed outside the quotation marks, whereas in AmE the final quotation marks always follow a period or a comma,

e.g. BrE: l) He said, "I love you".2) "I love you", he said.

AmE: 1) He said; "I love you." 2) "I love you," he said.

• In BrE most compound adjectives with the second component being Participle I or II are usually hyphenated, while in AmE they tend to be written solid,

e.g. BrE: home-made, easy-going, far-fetched, life-saving;

AmE: homemade, easygoing, farfetched, lifesaving.

lexical alternatives:

AmE BrE AmE BrE

gas petrol can tin

trash can dustbin street car tram

truck lorry cookies biscuits

faucet tap fall autumn

movie film store shop

diaper nappy pantyhose tights

cab taxi sedan saloon car

tuxedo dinner jacket thumbtack drawing pin

apartment flat elevator lift

sidewalk pavement high school secondary school

spool of thread cotton reel pom-pom bobble

zipper zip fastener French fries chips

oven mitt oven glove stove cooker

squash pumpkin eggplant aubergine

parking lot carpark (be) pooped (be) tired

3. Varieties of English throughout the world.

When different groups of people become separated by geographical, political, or social barriers, each group gradually develops its own variety of i the language, which is usually called a dialect. So long as the differences between the varieties do not make mutual comprehension impossible, though sometimes they do make it difficult, these varieties are said to be dialects of the same language.

The English language is widely used throughout the world. It is spoken in North America, in South Africa, West Africa, East Africa, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Pacific Islands, the Falklands, Gibraltar, Malta, and so on. Geographical sep­aration, political and social divergences as well as other extralinguistic fac­tors have brought about differences in the English language the people use.

The English language in the West Indies. The West Indies is the name for Caribbean islands (the Bahamas, the Atlantic and the Antilles), which curve east, south, and west from Florida to western Venezuela, thus separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea. The archipelago got its name as early as 1492 when Columbus, eager to find India and China by sailing westward, reached a tropical island, thinking that it was an island off the coast of India. It was Columbus who called the natives the ‘Indians’ and the newly-discovered islands the West Indies. After the discovery of the new land, Spanish and English settlements began to appear on the islands and the mainland of the New World. Starting from 1517, the Spanish used to import African slaves to work on the sugar plantations. Exploitation of people speaking different languages aimed at making it impossible for them to plot rebellion. Still, the need for communication caused the growth of the so-called pidgin forms.

NB: A pidgin is “any mixed language, spoken usually in trade, which uses the vocabulary of two or more languages and a simplified from of the grammar of one of them” [NWD]. Pidgin English is a variety of pidgin used in the Far East between Chinese and English-speaking people, and also a variety of pidgin used in Melanesia and North Australia.

Born of mixed marriages, children used pidgin as their mother tongue, producing the so-called Creole speech in the region.

NB: Creole [‘kri:oul] is defined as “1. a person of European blood born in the West Indies or Spanish America; a white person descended from French or Spanish settlers in Louisiana and the Gulf states; a person of mixed European and African blood in Louisiana and the Gulf states; the French patois ([‘pætwa] ‘dialect) spoken in these states” [NWD].

Nowadyas, Creole English represented by local variations of different traditional and social background is used in Central America, in the West Indies, especially in such areas as Jamaica, Grenada, Triniada and Tobaco, Dominica, and Antigua.

In his book The Stories of English, David Crystal gives an extract from a novel about the adventures of a creole to illustrate the speech of the latter. Here are a few lines from that book: “<…>you go make the most best soldier in a world. Me want soldier for fight, no for run away; so me no take you lame excuse” [Crystal, 2005: 437-8].

The English language in Canada. Nowadays Canada is an independent state in North America, a confederation within the British Commonwealth. A half of the population (48 %) is of British origin, a third (31 %) of French origin, the rest are immigrants from Germany, Ukraine, Poland and some other countries. The statistics show that about 67 % of people speak English only, 20 % speak French only, and approximately 13 % are bilingual.

Canada was discovered in 1497 by John Cabot ₍kæbət₎, who, like Columbus, was an Italian born in Genoa. He went to the English port of Bristol to make his living as a pilot. After Columbus discovery of the West Indies, he decided to find a way to the Spice Islands and make Bristol the largest spice market. King Henry VII sponsored the voyage. The country ( it was the island of Newfoundland) Cabot and his crew reached in 1497 was very much like Scotland, that’s why it was later called Nova Scotia (′nouvə′ skou∫ə), or New Scotland. Thinking that he had reached the northeastern coast of Asia, Cabot returned to England. But not until a century later did the first English immigrants appear on the new land.

Due to the territorial proximity with the Us, Canadian English has much in common with American English. The words listed below prove it.

American English Canadian English British English

candy candy sweets

car car carriage

stenographer stenographer short-hand writer

double glass window double window double- glazed window

grade grade form

graduate (n) graduate (n) school-leaver

store store shop

storekeeper storekeeper shopkeeper

casket casket coffin

cigar store cigar store tobacconist′s

first floor first floor ground floor

The English language in Australia. The Commonwealth of Australia is a federation of six states (New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland) and two territories (The Northern Territory and The Australian Capital territory). It has been a member of the Commonwealth of Nations since 1931.

Australia was discovered by the Portuguese in the 16 th c. Early in the 17 th c. the Dutch explored the north and west coast of the continent and named them New Holland. The Dutch navigator Abel J. Tasman ['tæzmən] discovered Tasmania and New Zealand (1642-3). The first English navigator was Captain James Cook, who sailed the entire length of the eastern coast in 1770, discovered Botany Bay and claimed the east coast region for Britain, naming it New South Wales. The English government decided to use the new land in an unusual way: having lost the American colonies, they began to transport convicts from overcrowded prisons to New South Wales. The first fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Philip (who was to become the colony's first governor) landed on the coast on January, 26, 1788. The transportation continued until 1840s. After the gold rush (1851) there came rapid developments: the huge influx of migrants caused appear­ance of new settlements and greatly changes the colonial social structure. Today the country is inhabited by various ethnic groups, among them Cau­casian (ab. 95 %), Asian (4 %), aboriginal and others. The official language of the country is English, but there are many people there speaking local (aboriginal) languages. It is from aboriginal speech that the words boomerang, kangaroo, cockatoo came into English. To Australianisms belong such words as

a billabong ['biləboŋ] a low area of ground where a river used to be, which only fills up with water when the river floods, стариця ріки;

a bikie ['baiki] (Br and Am biker) a member of a gang of motorcy­clists;

Big Wet - the season of rains;

a bubbler - питний фонтанчик;

to drop one's bundle - to surrender, to give up;

to get bushed - to lose one's way;

a nipper - a small boy;

a skerrick ['skerik] (usually in negatives) - a very small amount, e.g. There wasn 't a skerrick left.

a punnet ['pΛnit] - a small square or rectangular box in which par­ticular types of fruits are sold, e.g. a punnet of strawberries, a punnet of blackcurrants;

a punter - a person who makes a bet;

shypoo - a type of cheep beer;

a schoolie (infm) - a teacher in a school;

a scab - a strikebreaker;

sport - a friendly way of addressing someone, e.g. Hey, sport, how are you?

a pom, pommy (derog.) - an English person who moved to Australia recently;

an ocker, okker ['okə] - a type of Australian who is not well educated and does not behave in a polite way;

Aussie - an Australian;

dinkum /fair dinkum / square dinkum - real, perfect, true, original, marvelous, e.g. A dinkum Aussie tall, blond and suntanned thrust his way through a group of civilians (E. Williams).