The relation between Canada and the US

The whole of the praries and eastern BC is pretty similar though culturally.

The main difference as far as I can see is that Canadians have developed a niche in the world and Americans still haven't figured out how to pronounce it.

They pronounce it the way they pronounce it just to be contrary to the rest of the English speaking world. Same as why they spell stuff without the U, and ignore the letter H at the beginning of words and draw out the A in paaaah-sta.

And I've even met quite a few who are unaware that the rest of the English speaking world calls the last letter of the alphabet ZED, not ZEE. But to them that ruins the whole song

Case in point...I was in Denver CO a few years ago for a conference. We had a pub crawl night and there was a bunch of us playing pool (billiards). There was me the Canuck, 2 Texans and some other Yank (don't remember where he was from), a Brit, a Kiwi, and an Australian. I was talking to the Texans and they didn't believe me that the last letter of the alphabet is ZED. So, I shouted out to the other commonwealthers and asked them what it's called. And the Americans were flabbergasted that it should or would be called anything other than ZEE. They had no idea.

I'd say education has a big influence on our cultures. The US education system (at the elementary level, and likely secondary school) generally speaking, is rather insular, they don't teach much about the world at large. That has a rather large impact on how Americans think IMO. And while I've gathered that Canadian schools lrecently lack in world history and geography as well, at least when I went to school, we learned quite a lot about the rest of the world, and not just Canada. Of course, I'm 41 years old, and elementary school was quite a while ago

I was actually having this conversation yesterday with an American.

In American schools they're taught that English is a phonetic language like Spanish, so they end up applying these rules they're taught to french words like "niche" and also to placenames, which is why they screw everything up. Noah Webster was an English teacher and he thought it would be a good idea to make the language more phonetic, but I don't think he realized what the consequences would be.

Whenever I get into this discussion, I always point out to Americans that they don't pronounce "Arkansas" phonetically. Placenames generally aren't phonetic, e.g. the Potomac River. Or Norwich, VT. Some placenames Americans have altered from their original English spelling to make them phonetic, e.g. Litchfield, CT, which was originally "Lichfield".

In Canada, the UK, etc. I think more emphasis is placed on the correct pronounciation, which basically means you have to learn how it's pronounced in some cases because it's not merely phonetic.

I find it interesting that in eastern BC a lot of people pronounce "Coeur D'Alene" as: Curr Dah Leen, whereas in Idaho they say: Coar Dah Lain. People in BC are correct, because it's actually a French word.

But a lot of people here pronounce Spanish placenames in the US incorrectly, e.g. "Nevada", which we pronounce usually as: Nurr-var-duh and they pronounce it: Nuh-VAD-uh.

In either case it annoys me when people say: "oh that's just how we say it here", but that doesn't mean that it's right! Just means you've copied loads of other people who've gotten it wrong as well.

Try talking to someone from Boise. Everyone outside of Idaho pronounces it: Boy-zee, but in Idaho it's pronounced: Boy-see. So who's right, the people who live there or all the people who don't?

Well actually they're both wrong, it's French and it's pronounced: bwah-say.

I always turn my head around backwards when I hear how they've mangled French names down south. I recall watching NASCAR races on TV and a couple of driver's have very obviously French names by spelling, but by pronunciation...I have no clue how they came up with it honestly.

Hubby and I used to live in a town called Lenore. They spell it Lenoir though, just to confuse Canadians and French people. And there's a lot of German places around here too that have been Americanized (see, I use the American Z instead of the S which would be proper English spelling ) , Western NC had quite a lot of German immgrants during the 1800s. The current place names no longer resemble the original German however.

Well at least when Toronto incorporated all the surrounding towns a few years back it meant I didn't have to listen to people mangle: "Scarborough" anymore I suppose.

I was born in Scarberia

Scar-buh-ruh!!!