Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 15:09:22 -0500, Sam Ewalt wrote: > Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! > On Sat, 22 Oct 2005 10:10:31 +0011, Peter Lawrence wrote: >> The point is, American English IS a dialect (with sub-dialects). >> That's why I put "US dialect". But I, too, was focussing more on >> "PITA" than on your conflation of "ass" and "arse", probably one that >> arose from misspelling after a pronunciation shift made them sound the >> same in US dialect. PML. > There are many dialects of American English, as I'm sure you know. > There is no "US" dialect as such, although all of the dialects of > English spoken in the United States use the same spelling for the > words "ass" and "ass" because we say them the same. To us they > are one word with two different meanings. However, the four legged > beast is almost always called a "donkey" unless we are refering to > a Bible story or something archaic. > The word "arse" is not commonly used in American speech of any > type. We don't misspell it. We use a different word. We are only disagreeing on what we call a dialect. To me, that paragraph just there is outlining just what makes the common usage of the USA a dialect. What you are calling dialects are what I just referred to as sub-dialects. PML. GST+NPT=JOBS I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employme t. See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other items on that page for some reasons why. -- Arachne V1.77+/B~5 Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --