UK v US language difficulties reply to post from MAIN

[sistermagpie]

> Cassy:
> 
> You know, what I find really amazing is that people, for whom 
English 
> is not
> first language (myself included) somehow manage to understand BOTH 
> British
> and American English. (well, not Australian, perhaps ^_~). And being 
> native
> Russian speaker I can understand Ukrainian, Polish or, say, 
Belarussian
> fairly easily, since the languages are quite close. How come that 
people
> speaking ONE language have so much difficulties understanding each 
> other?

Magpie:
We really don't have much trouble understanding each other. Publishing 
companies sometimes, along with putting in the standard US spellings 
and punctuation, change some of the words to the American version. 
Since everything about HP is focused on intensely, this becomes 
intensely annoying.:-)

I must say, though, Mike Smith recently had a great defense of the 
use "Sorcerer's Stone." As a chemist he knows what the Philosopher's 
Stone is perfectly well, and actually did a fascinating post 
explaining the understanding about the world it came from. But he felt 
that some of the actual properties of it weren't the best fit with the 
Potterverse (for instance, to a person living in the time of alchemy 
making gold and immortality would naturally go together), and what's 
more, he thought that "Philosopher's Stone" rather stuck out in 
Rowling's world as not quite sounding like most of the words she used. 
He thought that since usually the Muggle Words we know are slightly 
wrong, there was nothing "dumb" about the stone really being called 
something else, or having had a name change in the WW over the years. 
After all, in the WW the word philosopher isn't used the same way it 
was used back then either.

-m