#OED Test
Tim,
I was going to quote something spectacular in Latin, but might
embarrass myself so I won't – haven't actually opened a Latin textbook for
14 years! We didn't have Greek in our school, just Latin, French or German.
Nowadays it's Japanese or Indonesian which makes a lot more sense
geographically (I'm an Australian, in case I hadn't mentioned).
I guess your quote about the Queen owning all the ships & the language says
it all – now the Americans own all the ships & the language is heading that
way as well. The OED is the last bastion of the language!
Here in Malaysia, 90% of dictionaries are Oxford variations (we can buy
American ones for comparison) & all schools teach the British spelling. I
was just peeved that Microsoft Malaysia refuses to even discuss the matter
– they just say "take it or leave it". From conversations in PACFORUM I
believe they have done the same thing in Australia. I'm not against having
all these languages (in the middle of learning Cantonese & Malay at the
moment – can speak reasonable Thai, though I've given up on trying to write
it), just don't like getting unsuitable products dumped on us. We get the
same problems with dates in a lot of software here – Americans use
Month/Day/Year while we use Day/Month/Year. I was pretty happy with Windows
in that you can set your Dates to the format you like, but I recently tried
some Windows software (can't remember the name) that ignored system
settings & forced me to use mm/DD/YY – threw the software away in
frustration!
Dave