'Fraid you're wrong! Classical---Pavlovian--- conditioning works best when it's every time. Operant conditioning---the one with reinforcement--- works best when playing with averages. This is one less obvious reason why people don't win every time at casinoes (there's a much more obvious reason, too, though:)
I don't see the average computer user doing that, regardless of how simple it is. That's why I prefixed it the way I did. Sure, it'd make sense for things to get the programs to automatically work out what the right display is, but for the kind of person I imagine doing this, it's simple enough. If anyone can think of a reasonable instance where a technophobe would need to, I might take back what I've said though...
By no means, btw, do I mean to suggest that Linux is fit for everyone's desktop. It isn't, and I don't think it will be even in a years' time. I do mean that some things are exaggerated, though. (TBH, I don't actually care whether it's ready for your desktop; it's ready for mine, that's good enough for me.)
5. Copy and paste work just fine for me. That is, they always do the same thing. Though I've never tried copying images from the Gimp to anything but the Gimp. Never felt the need.
6. All the scrollbars in the apps I use look the same...
7. Still an issue AFAIK.
8. Applications/Desktop Preferences/Screen Resolution. Seems reasonably clear and obvious and never asked me about scanlines, whatever they are. But oh, you ask regardless of what DE I use? Well, I can type 'xrandr -s 800x600'. But you probably think that isn't clear and obvious? I'm not sure how you can resolve that. The idea doesn't make any sense at all. Why would a KDEite want to use a Gnome app? or vice versa? No; changing screen res is a part of the DE's job.
9. Well, this is slightly technical. Typing 'xhost +' on something attached to the server and then 'DISPLAY="host:port" program' has always worked just fine, without worrying about any other settings, from four different computers to mine.
9a. I have no idea what you're talking about.
10. Not something I've dealt with. May well be an issue.
1. I haven't had a problem with that in a while. To be honest, though, I was surprised a while ago to discover that all I had to do was open fonts:/// in Nautilus (or, alternatively, ~/.fonts in ROX) and drag and drop them.
2. I can't remember glibc ever having been a problem. If I'm upgrading my system, what's wrong with upgrading it? Try using control panels from Windows XP in Windows 95.
3. ROX-Filer isn't linked to the Gnome or KDE libs. Also isn't linked to Gecko libs. Or even, for that matter, ROX-Libs. Likewise, KDE's file manager isn't linked to Gnome or ROX libs, nor is Nauti linked to KDE.
4. Different distributions are there to solve different problems. If you're using a distro that wants to conserve as much disk space as possible for whatever reason, I don't see them statically linking everything.
If I could get a Sun keyboard with those cool cut, copy, paste &c. keys working on my x86 linux box, I'd buy a Sun keyboard. Maybe they should sell cool keyboards?:)
In Australia, we pronounce 'due' the same as 'Jew', but 'do' as, well, 'doo'. It's always funny seeing Americans misspelling it like that. I normally survive without commenting, but sometimes it's just hard. No offence or correction intended!
-- Tristan Mc Leay I won't've been windows free for 10 years in June, but when it did happen, it wasn't such a big event that I can remember the year, let alone the month, I stopped using Windows (except on other's computers).
Incidentally, I've never heard of Norah Jones, Stokes or Clay Aiken; I don't know that I've ever heard the music of Justin Timberlake or whatever his name is. There's plenty of good music out there if you want to find it. New good music. New good music being written by bands who live in your city. (More addressed to all the 'old fogies' then the OP.)
And secondly, I will agree that copyright infringement is legally wrong; I'm yet to be convinced that it's morally wrong.
In general, if a child realises that it doesn't need a particular language to communicate, it doesn't learn it. The child will almost certainly bond better with people (it's difficult to bond with a creature when you can't live in the same environment...). You'd have to refuse to speak to it for this to work at all, and I doubt it'd get past an ethics committee.
I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we no what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Smut! Give me smut and nothing but! A dirty novel I can't shut, If it's uncut, and unsubt- le.
I've never quibbled If it was ribald, I would devour where others merely nibbled. As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense, "To be smut It must be ut- Terly without redeeming social importance."
Por- Nographic pictures I adore. Indecent magazines galore, I like them more If they're hard core.
(Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything! More, more, I'm still not satisfied!)
Stories of tortures Used by debauchers, Lurid, licentious, and vile, Make me smile. Novels that pander To my taste for candor Give me a pleasure sublime. (Let's face it, I love slime.)
All books can be indecent books Though recent books are bolder, For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. (I could tell you things about Peter Pan, And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
I thrill To any book like Fanny Hill, And I suppose I always will, If it is swill And really fil thy.
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately? I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley. But now they're trying to take it all away from us unless We take a stand, and hand in hand we fight for freedom of the press. In other words,
Smut! (I love it) Ah, the adventures of a slut. Oh, I'm a market they can't glut, I don't know what Compares with smut.
Hip hip hooray! Let's hear it for the Supreme Court! Don't let them take it away!
Indeed. I would say it isn't so much free software developers who are dodgy, it's primarily applications developed for smaller audiences. Whenever I've used programs designed for smaller audiences (most recently but not limited to the appropriately acronymed POS system where I work, and all I need to do on that is put in products and get back prices), I've always found the interfaces to be horribly annoying.
I might support Corel (or any for-profit company trying to be nice to Linux) if they make a native application (based on GTK2, Win32, Qt,...). If they make a Windows program (based on GTK2, Win32, Qt...), I will not. If they're making something platform agnostic, they aren't making a Linux application.
It's possible. One can never tell. It wouldn't likely be something they were instructed to do, but something they did because of the formality of the situation. Of course, as an American, Australian will sound pretty British to you anyway. Ahfta all, Ostralian is closely related, as I said, to British.
Kiwis are mostly like Australians, though a lot of Scottish people found their way there, esp. to South Island (I think). I dunno if convicts were ever sent there, but they weren't sent to Melbourne or Adelaide. And we've sent convicts to England too:) (America had a war to become independent; Australia slowly developed into it with a combination of legislation and High Court decisions. The High Court being the highest court in Australia.) The a>e>i thung us somethung thet hes heppend to some ixtint in Australia (end South Efruca, for thet metter), too, though certainly not to the same degree as in Kiwiland. End some buts of Amiruca seem to be doung the reverse; I've heard Amirucans sayung thungs like 'gass' for 'guess'. (Mumuckung Kiwi eccents us fun.)
(My grandparents on my mother's side are Dutch, but they don't sound anything like Kiwis, and certainly don't speak unaccented Australian.)
Pity someone never bothered to consider us poor people without 1280x1024 screens when designing that. I much rather much narrower runs of text. I like the LDP pages, because it means I can have my browser window as narrow as I want---and I want it narrower! Even if I make my window 800 pixels wide, I still have to horizontally scroll; maximised at 1024x768 still gives me a horizontal scrollbar, but at least I can read no problems.
I think before you enhance readability, you should try making it readable. There is no excuse for horizontal scrollbars.
I read that as complaining about the balloons, rather than the notification, though maybe I'm reading my own complains into it.
I hate using Windows, because these balloons keep popping up and there's no obvious way to get rid of them. Sometimes they have a close button, sometimes they don't. Sometimes clicking on them closes them, sometimes it runs a program. Sometimes they have a relatively short timeout, sometimes it lasts for ages. They're totally unpredictable for someone who uses Windows as rarely as I do.
On the other hand, Windows NT 4's implementation, which simply shows the status and gets out of your way, is much nicer. Exactly what the system tray should be like.
I betcha it's just habit and coincidence and nothing to do with biology.
I've seen films made in Australia where all sorts of accents were to be heard, from pretty close to generic American or "British light", to "you're from WHERE??" Well, Australia is a big country too:)
No. Australia's accent variation has typically been whether you say 'carsel' or 'cassel' for 'castle', or 'grarf' or 'graff' for 'graph' (as well as country folk using broad accents, which are kinda close to Hollywood Australian). Some parts of the country have the short front vowels higher then others (though not approaching New Zealand's height, wier they speak like thus end say funny thungs no ind).
Movies are a different matter, though. It's only been in the last hundred years that we've become independent from England both legally and culturally, so for certain people, English accents seem better to use when they're being recorded. And then American accents are more common on movies and a movie using the American accents used in movies seems more professional, and you get paid better for acting in America too. I don't really think that watching Australian movies or television is your best way of getting an idea of Australian accents. You're much better off coming down under:)
-- I pick up accents fast; if I lived there for two weeks, I'd sound just like y'all.:)
Just so long as you don't say 'y'all' too much! My database tutor* is American and uses 'y'all' all the time. It gets very tiring. (We use 'youse' or 'you'.)
* I haven't actually worked out how to translate 'tutor' (in this sense) into American yet, but that might just be the fact that my American college-going acquaintence isn't doing any subjects with a tute/lecture split. Somewhere in between a teaching assistant and a professor, I think.
I briefly scanned that post before reading it. I read it a second time, because I was convinced that when I'd scanned it, I'd seen a word that didn't appear in the proper reading. That word? 'Microsoft'.
Yeah... 'ass' totally replaced 'arse' in the US. It's been borrowed into Australia, but 'arse' is commoner. A word I read online from Americans every now-and-again which is never used in Australia is 'cuss', meaning 'curse'. It has the same origin. ('Bust', OTOH, has spread throughout the world, or at least to Australia.) This sound change happened in America and England, so there are some English who say 'ass', but it mostly the later r-dropping (which changes the sound of the vowel) became standard.
As to 'warsh', it's certainly nothing biological, and everything environmental. Can you say 'cosh' okay? or 'mosh'? Indeed, can you say 'wash' without the 'r'? Of course you can! One of your parents said 'wash', the other 'warsh' (though friends and peer-groups have a much bigger influence on your speech then your parents). Did you have the same groups of friends? I doubt it.
Irish accents sound quite distinct to me:) On the other hand, there are some London accents which sound very much like the siblings of my accent. And I'll say Canadian and Americans sound the same, but Canadians would dispute that:)
I find it highly unlikely that there are 80 mutually unintelligible dialects in England. A mutually unintelligible dialect is essentially a language. Scots, spoken in Scotland and Ulster (Ireland), is sometimes called a separate language, sometimes a dialect. We can blame the union of England and Scotland and subsequent dissolution of the Scottish Parliament for that. What I've heard of it is pretty hard to understand! (Scots isn't Scottish Standard English, nor is it Scots Gaelic.)
But some colloquial American dialects get a bit hard to understand. Someone claiming to be from the north-east described himself as what sounded like a 'lostin' to me, but he was saying painfully clearly 'law student'; or someone asked me for a 'pup', when really he meant 'soft drink' (it later occurred to me that he was trying to say 'pop'). I'm possibly at a disadvantage, though, because I don't watch much tv.
Well, mass communication has an affect, but of course it doesn't stop changes. Australian English continues to diverge from American even though the majority of our television is American. Indeed, Australian English is beginning to show regional variations (in the last twenty years, for instance, younger people in Victoria have begun pronouncing a short e as a short a before l, so that 'celery' and 'salary' are homophones). Australian English has long been held as an interesting dialect because so few speechgroups have been so homogeneous over so large an area.
And of course, the Chinese dialects aren't really dialects. They're independent languages. Unless, of course, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (Max Weinreich).
(e.g. many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's).
Not quite. They tend to use a (single) sound that we Engish speakers hear as an R when they want L and an L when they want R; we're hearing the differences, not the similarities. Same with some European dialects that sound like they're mixing up V and W: In fact, they're using one sound in between V and W for both.
Actually, that's not true. Obviously if you went to England, you'd have an accent. But there's a lot of different accents in England. Even in the city of London there's at least three native accents (Cockney, Estuary and Received). But that's not what I'm getting at.
British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English; American retains the flat a in words like 'fast' and 'pass' (so 'pass' and 'mass' rhyme), whereas in southern British English they've become the broad a. Most American dialects have retained the rhotic in almost all positions (and where it's been lost---words like 'ass' (from arse) and 'bust' (from burst)---the r is no longer written, left no trace, and the resultant word is generally distinct), but in almost all English English dialects I've heard (I'm Aussie), it's gone. Of course, British English is more conservative in other ways---it retains a three-way distinction between father/bother and cot/caught, for instance. (In everything here, Australian follows British. Sometimes Australian follows American. Sometimes Australian is original or shares changes with the other Southern Hemispherean Englishes.)
British English is no truer an english then any english. Just because the name of the language is the same as the adjective for things that come from England (and the name of the people from there, too) doesn't mean the English have any particular claim to English any more. Especially because there's probably as much variation in English English as there is in World English.
Slashdot Mirror
Lindows
Before you hand that in---I hope I'm not too late---you might want to proofread it for punctuation/grammar.
There's a single interesection like that in Melbourne Australia. Utterly bizarre.
'Fraid you're wrong! Classical---Pavlovian--- conditioning works best when it's every time. Operant conditioning---the one with reinforcement--- works best when playing with averages. This is one less obvious reason why people don't win every time at casinoes (there's a much more obvious reason, too, though :)
I don't see the average computer user doing that, regardless of how simple it is. That's why I prefixed it the way I did. Sure, it'd make sense for things to get the programs to automatically work out what the right display is, but for the kind of person I imagine doing this, it's simple enough. If anyone can think of a reasonable instance where a technophobe would need to, I might take back what I've said though...
By no means, btw, do I mean to suggest that Linux is fit for everyone's desktop. It isn't, and I don't think it will be even in a years' time. I do mean that some things are exaggerated, though. (TBH, I don't actually care whether it's ready for your desktop; it's ready for mine, that's good enough for me.)
5. Copy and paste work just fine for me. That is, they always do the same thing. Though I've never tried copying images from the Gimp to anything but the Gimp. Never felt the need.
:)
6. All the scrollbars in the apps I use look the same...
7. Still an issue AFAIK.
8. Applications/Desktop Preferences/Screen Resolution. Seems reasonably clear and obvious and never asked me about scanlines, whatever they are. But oh, you ask regardless of what DE I use? Well, I can type 'xrandr -s 800x600'. But you probably think that isn't clear and obvious? I'm not sure how you can resolve that. The idea doesn't make any sense at all. Why would a KDEite want to use a Gnome app? or vice versa? No; changing screen res is a part of the DE's job.
9. Well, this is slightly technical. Typing 'xhost +' on something attached to the server and then 'DISPLAY="host:port" program' has always worked just fine, without worrying about any other settings, from four different computers to mine.
9a. I have no idea what you're talking about.
10. Not something I've dealt with. May well be an issue.
11. Sounds like you've got yourself a job!
1. I haven't had a problem with that in a while. To be honest, though, I was surprised a while ago to discover that all I had to do was open fonts:/// in Nautilus (or, alternatively, ~/.fonts in ROX) and drag and drop them.
2. I can't remember glibc ever having been a problem. If I'm upgrading my system, what's wrong with upgrading it? Try using control panels from Windows XP in Windows 95.
3. ROX-Filer isn't linked to the Gnome or KDE libs. Also isn't linked to Gecko libs. Or even, for that matter, ROX-Libs. Likewise, KDE's file manager isn't linked to Gnome or ROX libs, nor is Nauti linked to KDE.
4. Different distributions are there to solve different problems. If you're using a distro that wants to conserve as much disk space as possible for whatever reason, I don't see them statically linking everything.
If I could get a Sun keyboard with those cool cut, copy, paste &c. keys working on my x86 linux box, I'd buy a Sun keyboard. Maybe they should sell cool keyboards? :)
OT, but
In Australia, we pronounce 'due' the same as 'Jew', but 'do' as, well, 'doo'. It's always funny seeing Americans misspelling it like that. I normally survive without commenting, but sometimes it's just hard. No offence or correction intended!
-- Tristan Mc Leay
I won't've been windows free for 10 years in June, but when it did happen, it wasn't such a big event that I can remember the year, let alone the month, I stopped using Windows (except on other's computers).
You forgot bandwidth and ISP costs, mate. If you only download one song a month, it can be as high as $80!
Incidentally, I've never heard of Norah Jones, Stokes or Clay Aiken; I don't know that I've ever heard the music of Justin Timberlake or whatever his name is. There's plenty of good music out there if you want to find it. New good music. New good music being written by bands who live in your city. (More addressed to all the 'old fogies' then the OP.)
And secondly, I will agree that copyright infringement is legally wrong; I'm yet to be convinced that it's morally wrong.
In general, if a child realises that it doesn't need a particular language to communicate, it doesn't learn it. The child will almost certainly bond better with people (it's difficult to bond with a creature when you can't live in the same environment...). You'd have to refuse to speak to it for this to work at all, and I doubt it'd get past an ethics committee.
I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we no what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut,
If it's uncut,
and unsubt- le.
I've never quibbled
If it was ribald,
I would devour where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he
acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."
Por-
Nographic pictures I adore.
Indecent magazines galore,
I like them more
If they're hard core.
(Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties,
samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything!
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!)
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious, and vile,
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
(Let's face it, I love slime.)
All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
I thrill
To any book like Fanny Hill,
And I suppose I always will,
If it is swill
And really fil
thy.
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
But now they're trying to take it all
away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand
we fight for freedom of the press.
In other words,
Smut! (I love it)
Ah, the adventures of a slut.
Oh, I'm a market they can't glut,
I don't know what
Compares with smut.
Hip hip hooray!
Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!
Don't let them take it away!
Indeed. I would say it isn't so much free software developers who are dodgy, it's primarily applications developed for smaller audiences. Whenever I've used programs designed for smaller audiences (most recently but not limited to the appropriately acronymed POS system where I work, and all I need to do on that is put in products and get back prices), I've always found the interfaces to be horribly annoying.
I might support Corel (or any for-profit company trying to be nice to Linux) if they make a native application (based on GTK2, Win32, Qt, ...). If they make a Windows program (based on GTK2, Win32, Qt ...), I will not. If they're making something platform agnostic, they aren't making a Linux application.
It's possible. One can never tell. It wouldn't likely be something they were instructed to do, but something they did because of the formality of the situation. Of course, as an American, Australian will sound pretty British to you anyway. Ahfta all, Ostralian is closely related, as I said, to British.
:) (America had a war to become independent; Australia slowly developed into it with a combination of legislation and High Court decisions. The High Court being the highest court in Australia.) The a>e>i thung us somethung thet hes heppend to some ixtint in Australia (end South Efruca, for thet metter), too, though certainly not to the same degree as in Kiwiland. End some buts of Amiruca seem to be doung the reverse; I've heard Amirucans sayung thungs like 'gass' for 'guess'. (Mumuckung Kiwi eccents us fun.)
Kiwis are mostly like Australians, though a lot of Scottish people found their way there, esp. to South Island (I think). I dunno if convicts were ever sent there, but they weren't sent to Melbourne or Adelaide. And we've sent convicts to England too
(My grandparents on my mother's side are Dutch, but they don't sound anything like Kiwis, and certainly don't speak unaccented Australian.)
Pity someone never bothered to consider us poor people without 1280x1024 screens when designing that. I much rather much narrower runs of text. I like the LDP pages, because it means I can have my browser window as narrow as I want---and I want it narrower! Even if I make my window 800 pixels wide, I still have to horizontally scroll; maximised at 1024x768 still gives me a horizontal scrollbar, but at least I can read no problems.
I think before you enhance readability, you should try making it readable. There is no excuse for horizontal scrollbars.
I have a legally licensed copy of Windows XP, but don't have a Windows XP box. But then, I don't use it...
I read that as complaining about the balloons, rather than the notification, though maybe I'm reading my own complains into it.
I hate using Windows, because these balloons keep popping up and there's no obvious way to get rid of them. Sometimes they have a close button, sometimes they don't. Sometimes clicking on them closes them, sometimes it runs a program. Sometimes they have a relatively short timeout, sometimes it lasts for ages. They're totally unpredictable for someone who uses Windows as rarely as I do.
On the other hand, Windows NT 4's implementation, which simply shows the status and gets out of your way, is much nicer. Exactly what the system tray should be like.
I betcha it's just habit and coincidence and nothing to do with biology.
I've seen films made in Australia where all sorts of accents were to be heard, from pretty close to generic American or "British light", to "you're from WHERE??" Well, Australia is a big country too
No. Australia's accent variation has typically been whether you say 'carsel' or 'cassel' for 'castle', or 'grarf' or 'graff' for 'graph' (as well as country folk using broad accents, which are kinda close to Hollywood Australian). Some parts of the country have the short front vowels higher then others (though not approaching New Zealand's height, wier they speak like thus end say funny thungs no ind).
Movies are a different matter, though. It's only been in the last hundred years that we've become independent from England both legally and culturally, so for certain people, English accents seem better to use when they're being recorded. And then American accents are more common on movies and a movie using the American accents used in movies seems more professional, and you get paid better for acting in America too. I don't really think that watching Australian movies or television is your best way of getting an idea of Australian accents. You're much better off coming down under
-- I pick up accents fast; if I lived there for two weeks, I'd sound just like y'all.
Just so long as you don't say 'y'all' too much! My database tutor* is American and uses 'y'all' all the time. It gets very tiring. (We use 'youse' or 'you'.)
* I haven't actually worked out how to translate 'tutor' (in this sense) into American yet, but that might just be the fact that my American college-going acquaintence isn't doing any subjects with a tute/lecture split. Somewhere in between a teaching assistant and a professor, I think.
I briefly scanned that post before reading it. I read it a second time, because I was convinced that when I'd scanned it, I'd seen a word that didn't appear in the proper reading. That word? 'Microsoft'.
I think I need to take a break.
Yeah... 'ass' totally replaced 'arse' in the US. It's been borrowed into Australia, but 'arse' is commoner. A word I read online from Americans every now-and-again which is never used in Australia is 'cuss', meaning 'curse'. It has the same origin. ('Bust', OTOH, has spread throughout the world, or at least to Australia.) This sound change happened in America and England, so there are some English who say 'ass', but it mostly the later r-dropping (which changes the sound of the vowel) became standard.
:) On the other hand, there are some London accents which sound very much like the siblings of my accent. And I'll say Canadian and Americans sound the same, but Canadians would dispute that :)
As to 'warsh', it's certainly nothing biological, and everything environmental. Can you say 'cosh' okay? or 'mosh'? Indeed, can you say 'wash' without the 'r'? Of course you can! One of your parents said 'wash', the other 'warsh' (though friends and peer-groups have a much bigger influence on your speech then your parents). Did you have the same groups of friends? I doubt it.
Irish accents sound quite distinct to me
I find it highly unlikely that there are 80 mutually unintelligible dialects in England. A mutually unintelligible dialect is essentially a language. Scots, spoken in Scotland and Ulster (Ireland), is sometimes called a separate language, sometimes a dialect. We can blame the union of England and Scotland and subsequent dissolution of the Scottish Parliament for that. What I've heard of it is pretty hard to understand! (Scots isn't Scottish Standard English, nor is it Scots Gaelic.)
But some colloquial American dialects get a bit hard to understand. Someone claiming to be from the north-east described himself as what sounded like a 'lostin' to me, but he was saying painfully clearly 'law student'; or someone asked me for a 'pup', when really he meant 'soft drink' (it later occurred to me that he was trying to say 'pop'). I'm possibly at a disadvantage, though, because I don't watch much tv.
Well, mass communication has an affect, but of course it doesn't stop changes. Australian English continues to diverge from American even though the majority of our television is American. Indeed, Australian English is beginning to show regional variations (in the last twenty years, for instance, younger people in Victoria have begun pronouncing a short e as a short a before l, so that 'celery' and 'salary' are homophones). Australian English has long been held as an interesting dialect because so few speechgroups have been so homogeneous over so large an area.
And of course, the Chinese dialects aren't really dialects. They're independent languages. Unless, of course, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy (Max Weinreich).
(e.g. many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's).
Not quite. They tend to use a (single) sound that we Engish speakers hear as an R when they want L and an L when they want R; we're hearing the differences, not the similarities. Same with some European dialects that sound like they're mixing up V and W: In fact, they're using one sound in between V and W for both.
Actually, that's not true. Obviously if you went to England, you'd have an accent. But there's a lot of different accents in England. Even in the city of London there's at least three native accents (Cockney, Estuary and Received). But that's not what I'm getting at.
British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English; American retains the flat a in words like 'fast' and 'pass' (so 'pass' and 'mass' rhyme), whereas in southern British English they've become the broad a. Most American dialects have retained the rhotic in almost all positions (and where it's been lost---words like 'ass' (from arse) and 'bust' (from burst)---the r is no longer written, left no trace, and the resultant word is generally distinct), but in almost all English English dialects I've heard (I'm Aussie), it's gone. Of course, British English is more conservative in other ways---it retains a three-way distinction between father/bother and cot/caught, for instance. (In everything here, Australian follows British. Sometimes Australian follows American. Sometimes Australian is original or shares changes with the other Southern Hemispherean Englishes.)
British English is no truer an english then any english. Just because the name of the language is the same as the adjective for things that come from England (and the name of the people from there, too) doesn't mean the English have any particular claim to English any more. Especially because there's probably as much variation in English English as there is in World English.