I don’t think that’s what she’s asking. “I will write you a letter” is the correct form in British English, too. Saying “I will write you.” instead of “I will write to you.” to declare that you intend to send somebody a letter, is not.
There’s also a related form, sometimes seen on (presumably) American websites. Instead of “Contact Us”, the contact page will be entitled “Write Us” (example here).
Both uses of “write” sound bizarre to British (and probably Commonwealth) ears.
Yes, it’s bizarre to Commonwealth ears too.
Another one is the US “I’m going upstairs and lie down” versus the Commonwealth “I’m going upstairs to lie down”. But I can see the American logic too, and also I somehow suspect it might be a US regionalism. US dopers confirm?
Think of it as analogous to “I will call you” or “Call us.”
I disagree - “fall” has another meaning (as in “fall over”), whereas “autumn” means the season and only that. “She broke her hip in the fall” is ambiguous; “she broke her hip in the autumn” is not.
Not according to the Online Etymology Dictionary
Autumn - c.1374, from O.Fr. autumpne, from L. autumnus, a word probably of Etruscan origin. *Harvest *was the Eng. name for the season until *autumn *began to displace it 16c.
Fall - Noun sense of “autumn” (now only in U.S.) is 1664, short for *fall of the leaf *(1545).
I believe the omisson of the article mainly is a dialect difference in the UK. . .I’ve heard it in many UK TV shows set in Yorkshire and the north. And it’s not just a different use sense of a noun as in the “go to school”/“go to university” thing (which could be a plausible, PARTIAL explanation). In one show I just saw a (Yorkish) character asked another “did you vote for me to have money” where “THE money” in question was a very definate thing, and that was just one of dozens of examples from the show. Strangely enough, the omitted “the” often was added in the closed captioning.
The interesting question is why does the dialect often drop the article “the”. Either it’s a contraction OR a holdover from a prior language common to the region (English is a mish-mash of invader languages) that might not have used articles as rigorously as French, Spanish, German and even proper English. There ARE such languages, I hear Russian omits articles in one way or another, thought that specific language isn’t an influence in this case.
Similarly with going “to college”. In both variants, the expression is understood to mean an unspecified tertiary degree granting institution.
To this day Herbst is standard German for “fall”, and is a word I probably learned in the first week or two of my first German class. But it wasn’t until recently that I came across the dialectical variant Hervest, and finally became aware that “harvest” and Herbst are cognates.
But that’s basically the same too. We say “going to college” whether we mean one that calls itself a college, like Harvey Mudd or Whittier, or one that calls itself a university, like UC, CMU, or Columbia.
In the US, yes. But not everywhere, which is the point.
I went to Trent University. I would say ‘I went to uni’. Had I attended Sir Sanford Fleming (the college in the same city*), then I would say ‘I went to college’.
Thus, there is a cultural difference in whether someone would say they attended college if they went to a university.
I’m not British, so I can’t comment on the usage in specifics, but I do know that ‘college’ isn’t the generic for both types of institution, there, either.
Someone at the quoted blog must have read this because it has been corrected and now says ‘write to us’ twice.
This is incorrect (and the matter has been hashed out in detail in numerous other threads on this board). Yorkshire dialect does not omit a “the” where American English (and other dialects of British English) would use one. Rather, Yorkshire dialect often pronounces “the” as little more than a glottal slop, which an ear unused to the dialect might miss. Assuming your interpretation of the sentence in question is correct, what the Yorkshire speaker you heard actually said would best be rendered “did you vote for me to have t’ money”. If you had been listening for it, you would have heard it. It is not an omission of “the” (which is why the closed captioning included the word), it is a dialect pronunciation of “the”.
As for “the” before “hospital”, British English does not omit it. Rather, British English draws a subtle distinction of meaning between “in hospital” (=being treated, probably as an in-patient, in some hospital or other) and “in the hospital” (=currently inside a particular hospital building, not necessarily as a patient). This a standard and regular distinction in English grammar, and Americans use it in the same way when discussing other similar types of institutional building. American English, like British English, recognizes the difference between “in prison” and “in the prison”, “in court” and “in the court”, “in school”* and “in the school”, etc. The anomaly here is not that British speakers sometimes, when semantically appropriate, omit “the” before “hospital”, but that (apparently) Americans, just in the case of the word “hospital”, never do so, thus robbing themselves of the ability to make a semantic distinction that both British and American English avail themselves of in other similar cases. If a British speaker tells me that “John is in hospital”, I know that John is sick, and being treated there. If they tell me that “John is in the hospital”, I know that he is probably not sick (at least, not sick enough to be hospitalized), but is in the hospital building, probably temporarily, and probably for some other reason (such as because he is doctor, or is making a delivery, or is visiting someone who is a patient, and thus “in hospital”). An American speaker, by contrast, because of the strange reluctance to ever omit the “the” before “hospital” (and only “hospital” AFAIK), would have to use a lot more words to make the situation clear.
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*Actually, a British speaker would probably say “at school” in this case, but that is another issue. The distinction between “in/at school” and “in/at the school” is the same one as between “in hospital” and “in the hospital”, or “in jail” and “in the jail”, etc.
Slightly off-topic observation alert … although that may be true in the US, it is quite the opposite in the UK, where your social status, even in these egalitarian days, is pretty much defined by which school you attended in your teenage years.
Well, we just shift that somewhat in the U.S. We put our university stickers on our cars.
And people who got their bachelor’s degrees at Harvard often decline to say “Harvard” when in a group of non-Harvardians. They say “I went to school in Boston,” acknowledging the power if the status that this grants them.
Excepting the unreasonable amount of importance people attach to having attended a very small number of elite private schools, this doesn’t happen in my experience. I grew up in one of the few parts of the country that still have grammar schools, and there was certainly some rivalry/snobbery/reverse snobbery going on while at school age, but since leaving school I can’t think of a single time it has come up.
Absolutely untrue in my experience. Nobody cares where you went to high school/secondary school, unless you’re talking about the tiny number of people that Bozuit mentions. I can’t remember ever being asked about it. Unless the fact that I went to a mere state school is so screamingly obvious that people are too polite to mention it.
A Brit would say “I’ll be at uni in/this autumn”.
But I think this discussion needs to be taken further. How would you use terms such as “channel tunnel”? My instinct is to drop any “the” but it still sounds odd.
A new usage here in the UK that always annoys me (I’m getting old) is when banks tell us that the matter will be dealt with ‘in branch’. Not ‘your branch’, 'a branch, ‘the branch’ etc. Why? How did this come about?
A Brit would say “I’ll be at uni in/this autumn”.? This would be pretty ambiguous. A Student would say "I’ll be back at (or starting) Uni in the Autumn or they might say “I’ll be at uni this autumn”. A lecturer might say "I’ll be at The University in the Autumn. (but only if ‘The University’ was already known, otherwise he would name it).
The Channel Tunnel is a proper noun and should be capitalised. Using the definite article or not seems to be a matter of choice and I see it dropped in the media more than in regular speech. No one should use newspapers as a style guide, either here in the UK or anywhere else, otherwise we might be calling it that horrible contraction - Chunnel.
Because they’re talking about whatever branch you decide to go to to deal with that matter. They’re not talking about a specific branch. It does sound a little odd but that’s probably because it’s new.