Commentary

NOTES

1.... how much Ben earned per annum

Per annum (Lat.)

The preposition per is a Latin word meaning by, through. It entered the English literary language in combination with certain Latin nouns, e. g.

• per annum by the year
• per centum by the hundred
• per capita by the head
• Later per began to be used in English with the meanings by, by means of, through, by the action of, e. g.
• per head с головы, на душу
• per year в год
• per man на человека
• per post почтой
• per К- Smith через К. Смита

The old Latin word combinations are rarely used today except in legal or official documents.

2. Mr. Drake, care of Mr. Ralph Thayer...

Care of (c/o) is usually written on letters (telegrams, packages, etc) before the name of the person to whose house (office, etc) a letter (a telegram, etc) to another person is sent.

The examples above illustrate some lexical (1), spelling (2) and grammatical (3) peculiarities of American English (AE) as compared with British English (BE).

British and American English are considered to be variants of the same language. They display a number of differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and spelling. But obvious as they are, these differences in no way violate the whole system of the English language.

The differences in pronunciation are of a most systematic character. They immediately identify a speaker as belonging to the one community or to the other, Yet even so, there is no doubt that the phonetic system is essentially identical for the two variants.

The greater proportion of English vocabulary is also common to both variants of English. There are, however, quite a large number of cases in which different words are used in BE and AE to denote similar ideas and objects, e. g.

(For other examples of vocabulary differences between BE and AE see exercise XVII.)

Spelling differences are fairly systematic too.

The following list includes examples of the main types of spelling differences.

The number of grammatical differences turns out to be rather small. They have to do with some verbal forms, prepositions, articles, e. g.

The examples given above do not cover every possible difference in vocabulary, grammar, spelling between BE and AE. What is important to bear in mind is that these differences are not so numerous and fundamental as to consider British and American English two' separate languages. The more so that nowadays the differences are getting fewer due to the extensive penetration of Americanisms into BE and vice versa.