[originaltext]British man: What is there about this English language of , ours

British man: What is there about this English language of , ours that makes it possible for the two of us --having grown up,perhaps,4,000 miles apart--to be able to communicat4 so easily?
American man: Well, we might begin by recognizing that language consists of sounds, words, inflections, and the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences.
B: Let’s begin with one of these: the inflectional forms--for example, the noun plurals and verb tenses. Surely, in the, aspect, British and American English have not diverged very much, have they?
A: No, not at all. Thousands of nouns form their plurals in the regular fashion in the manner of “cat  .....  cats”; "dog"--" dogs  ....  church"--" churches". And this is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Would you say the same thing for the verbs? B: Yes, I think I would. Here again the regular forms are so overwhelming in number, aren’t they? For most of the verbs, our two forms of language are pretty well identical.
A. Well, that depends on what you mean by identity. I can think, for example, of instances where our spellings are alike but the pronunciation is different. For example, the past of the verb "eat."
B. Yes, the past tense is spelled in both forms of English "a--t--e". But I pronounce this as [ et ] to rhyme with “get” as do most of us in Britain, and I think that we would tend to regard the American pronunciation as a relatively uneducated one. Isn’t it true that most educated people in the U.S. would rhyme "ate" with" late" regard the British pronunciation as a bit odd?
A: More than a bit odd. I would say. Actually to us, [ ct ] seems countrified, even uneducated. We could supply other examples here, but I think we should go on to the order of words in phrases and sentences. After all, it is through word order, rather than inflectional forms, that so much of our grammatical meaning is conveyed.
B: Yes, and I suppose this is one of the reasoas why we have so little difficulty in understanding each other. It’s hard to think of any place that you and I would have arranged the principal sentence elements in a different way.
A: You are right, of course. For example, the entire English -speaking world puts the subject before the verb and the object after it in making a sentence.
B: None of these grammatical differences add up to very much, do they? Let’s talk briefly now about pronunciation. Take the difference that is probably best known: the sounding or not sounding of [r] after vowels in words like "bird" and "hurt". It’s not just a matter of saying that Americans sound the [r] s and the Britishers don’t. After all, as you know, in Scotland, Lancashire, Ireland, and the whole of the western counties of England really, the [r] s are pronounced more or less as they are with you.
A: Yes, and in the States, on the other hand, you will find a rather large area in New England, almost all of the area’, a- round New York City, and various parts of the coastal south, where the Americans don’t sound the [r] s. And it’s equally difficult to generalize about the differences in pronunciation of words like dance", which I pronounce with the vowel in cap-[L] and you pronounce with the vowel in "father’; [a: ]. In the United States we vary a good deal; for example, eastern New England has the [a] type of pronunciation.
B: As you know, we don’t have [ ct: ] at all widely either. It occurs among educated speakers and in the South and in London, but in the northern counties of England people have a pronunciation similar to yours. So I think we should insist on people not exaggerating the differences between British and American English.