Non-Americans, what do you find weird about America? (and vice versa)

[daveb]

3 minutes ago, Arodash said:

I also heard that Noah Webster was trying to seperate American english from British English but maybe thats just an urban legend lol 

Could be (either way). Who knows?  

[Piotrek]

9 hours ago, Arodash said:

I also heard that Noah Webster was trying to seperate American english from British English but maybe thats just an urban legend lol 

That's what I heard at uni. A shame he didn't succeed in simplifying the spelling further. 

[Dodoa]

I had to read some texts written in the US in the late 1600s and the thing is, spelling was simply not a thing in them. Like the same word may be spelled two different ways in the same document, so I don't think it's that one country changed their spelling and the other didn't, it's probably more likely that all of them standardised their spelling more or less independently.

[daveb]

9 hours ago, Dodoa said:

I had to read some texts written in the US in the late 1600s and the thing is, spelling was simply not a thing in them.

To be pedantic, there wasn't a US in the 1600s. There were British colonies.

It is true spelling was fast and loose back in those days.

But Noah Webster published his dictionary in 1828 (Samuel Johnson published his in 1755 - so there were people trying to standardize spelling), and Webster did lobby for spelling reforms, even to the extent of trying to get Congress to pass laws legally mandating some of his reforms. Not all of his "reforms" were adopted into standard American English.

[daveb]

19 minutes ago, Arodash said:

The 1600s saw the first form of cooperation between colonies, the New England Confederation was a treaty signed by the new england colonies to help each other

Interesting, but not surprising.

Still, I don't know if you could say there was an American identity at that time. Even in the early days of the actual United States as a nation, I don't know if the idea of someone being American, per se, was common. I think it was more likely people would consider themselves, say, Virginian first and maybe not even think about being American, especially the regular person (as opposed to some leaders?). Even these days people often think of identifying with their state first (although, it might be the opposite in some situations, such as when traveling outside the US).

 

It's kind of an odd mix of identifying with one's state and with the country as a whole, that maybe seems odd to people who live with other systems?

[Zebigbos]

A big pet peeve of mine about the USA is the use of the worlds "America" and "american". I am brazilian and that makes me american as well, since Brazil is located in the american continent. However the term "american" has been almost completely claimed by the USA, to the point that no other country in America can use it.

[daveb]

It's hard to come up with a good not overly wordy demonym for United States of America.

[Zebigbos]

I know. In portuguese we have the word "estadunidense" which means "person from the US", but most people still use "american" nonetheless.

[daveb]

Mexico's full name translated to English is the United Mexican States, so that could throw a monkey wrench into demonyms, too.  

[Zebigbos]

Intresting, so Mexico is a US as well...

[Skycaptain]

It's why you'd describe someone as being North American, Central American or South American, in the same way as European for example, if you want to identify the continent they're from, then American, Panamanian, Brazilian, and German are used as nationalities