A bizarre incident involving a mentally ill woman recently occurred at a store in Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, where the suspect, wielding knives and wearing a cat mask, threatened employees and customers, including small children.
When the police arrested her and asked why she did it, she answered “meow” and said, “Can’t tell you that, meow.”
Excuse me, WTF? I have lived 7 years in the UK, and never have I heard a cat profer this kind of drivel. Is this some cockney shit?
Also, thank you for your insight about mammal accents. It made me slightly xenophobic but I appreciate the knowledge.
Are you saying that miaow and meow sound different phonetically to you?
Its not cockney rhyming slang, but rather a simple variance in spelling. Do colour Vs color/ catalogue Vs catalog etc… sound different phonetically to you also?
I’m a native English speaker, so maybe that’s why they seem identical; but I could see how a different mother tongue would change that perspective.
Edit: removed aluminium because I momentarily forgot that Americans say ‘aloomanum’ and that one isn’t an example of a spelling variance with identical phonetics.
I suppose all the examples you give convey some little trace of the accent from their respective regions. Slightly longer final syllables in the UK for instance.
But more to the point, the spelling ‘miaow’ is completely new to me. But I receive very few letters from British cats so maybe that explains it.
Here’s an example from the BBC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeUM1WDoOGY
Though just to mix things up, the BBC Earth YouTube channel appears to be using title case capitalization in that title, which is typically an American English style, there. The main BBC YouTube channel appears to use the more-usually British English sentence case capitalization.
So I expect that there’s always the possibility that people aren’t always super-religious about the form of English that they use.
To be fair, those different spellings denote different variants of the language, and these words are pronounced differently in British and American English. So yeah, perceiving those as if those sound different is a normal thing, I guess
Edit: ironically, miaow and meow make an identical sound, according to Cambridge Dictionary: ˌmiːˈaʊ
You perceive colour/color and catalogue/catalog to be pronounced differently?
I’d have to disagree with that, and it seems American grammar is still aligned with British in that they’re still identical phonetically. I think it’s important to disregard accent in this discussion, as it isn’t relevant to the spelling. An Indian man saying colour will sound different to an Irishman saying colour for example, but that has nothing to do with the spelling; just the respective accent.
The difference in spelling was an act of defiance by the Americans during the British empire days. In many cases it has nothing to do with a difference in pronunciation . It’s an interesting slice of history, and I’d recommend anyone who isn’t aware to read up on the subject it really ruffled some feathers on this side of the pond, and some 200 years later, people still aren’t over it. It was some of the highest quality trolling in recent history (one that I believe trumps the Boston tea party; but I guess that’s a matter of opinion).
They also simplified spelling to make literacy a bit easier. The downside was that it obscured etymologies. And they didn’t reform spelling all that much. The last time written English was a phonetic representation of spoken English was in Chaucer’s time, before the Great Vowel Shift. Even then, there were big dialectal differences that weren’t always respected in spelling (e.g., Somerset’s metathesis of “great” into “gurt,” which still survives in some rural populations).
I find your point of disregarding American vs British pronunciation whilst regarding American vs British spelling a bit strange
Accent <> pronunciation.
Yeah, but they can significantly overlap.
For example, some London accents pronounce “think” as “fink” and “bottle” as “bo’le” (the apostrophe denoting a glottal stop). Some Glaswegian accents pronounce “father” as “fayther.”
I agree completely. Yet the spelling in each of those scenarios is still identical, which is what I was driving at originally. Colour and color do not denote a difference in pronunciation; and this is backed up by the phonetics listed for the respective words in American and English dictionaries… The phonetics are identical.
Accents muddy this, which is why they should be disregarded when comparing the phonetics between variations of English words.
Otherwise we’d need at least 3 pages for each word in the dictionary just to list the phonetics for each accent in the UK. Let alone the rest of the English speaking nations.
Nearly all of the words with different spelling are pronounced identically, except for accent differences that are not reflected in the spelling. “Aluminum/Aluminium” is the only commonly used exception I can think of.
Source: I’ve lived many decades in the US, and decades in the UK as well, and my job requires me to write in UKglish.