Algeo's Origins and Development of the English Language - Research - Part Five

Today, there are at least one billion people on Earth that can speak English fluently. Of these people, most can be divided into two groups: British and American English. There are several differences within these groups. First, the R sound was temporarily lost in British speakers, and this loss transferred over into the New Englander's accent. Americans use the word 'got' in several technically out-of-context ways, such as 'She has got to help us'. Gotten is supposed to be a past participle of get, such as it is used in 'ill-gotten gains'. 'Got' in the American vocabulary has transformed into a different way of saying 'to be obligated to'. Some words that differ between British and American, besides the obvious ones, are waistcoat and vest, and fortnight and two weeks. British also has words that the American vocabulary has no need for: copse, dell, fen, heath, moor, spinney, and wold. American English also mirrors this by having several geographical words that British English has no room for, such as underbrush, creek, (which is a sea inlet in British, and a small stream in American), backwoods, canyon, mesa, and prairie. When English explorers discovered new species of animals in the Americas, they used Indian words to name the unfamiliar ones, such as raccoon and woodchuck. Animals that looked similar to British animals shared their British name, whether or not they were of the same species. For example, British and American robins are not related at all. This included plant names, such as catalpa, (literally meaning 'a type of tree') and catawba, (literally meaning a variety of grape.) Sometimes they relied specifically on their imagination of they ran out of ideas, and the etymologies of these specific words are unclear for this specific reason.