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Comment by murphyslab | Hacker News Reader

One persistent problem is that there isn't a Canadian English spelling option in most software with spellchecking functionality. Often we are forced to choose between US English and British English spelling defaults, when neither is quite right. I suspect that this was a stylistic choice not of Carney himself, but whoever proofread the document. There has been considerable erosion in Canadian orthography in of late, which has only been made worse with the widespread adoption of UFLI English language learning materials in our schools' elementary curricula, which emphasizes American spelling and pronunciation.

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The reality is quite complicated. Canadian English is a version of North American English, with a distinctive pronunciation and sub-dialect, but still has vestiges of British English that are lost in America.

I feel like Canada is of two minds, awkwardly and indecisively straddling North American English and British English. It wasn’t until I worked overseas that I realized North America has a very distinctive English that imprints on people, even if they lived there a few years. As in Londoners who spent a few years in North America as toddlers have obvious North American tonality, which is baffling to me.

I have native relatives in Canada and the UK and I find the language dynamics across the anglosphere fascinating.

> The reality is quite complicated. Canadian English is a version of North American English, with a distinctive pronunciation and sub-dialect, but still has vestiges of British English that are lost in America.

Does Canadian English still use "gotten"? IIRC, that's a vestige of British English that's been lost in Britain.

Yes (though I feel it's always had an awkward air about its use, and it feels more polite and high class to use received)

The rest of the world doesn't consider 'gotten' a proper word?

Except ill gotten gains?

New Englander here. Gotten is normal vocabulary. If it's not used in British English, then it's probably a feature of North American English, since most North American linguistic differences are snapshots of common features of 16th-17th century British English that somehow ossified over here.

Edit: It appears my conjecture was correct: https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/on-the-use-of-the-word-gotten/

What I'm most interested is not usage of "gotten", but whether somewhere in the English-speaking world, using "I've" standalone (without a follow-on got, been, had etc) is normal.

I see it from time to time online, and immediately assume they're a non-native speaker who doesn't understand the nonsensical nuances of the language.

Eg people will say something like "I've 3 apples", which is just "I have 3 apples", which is perfectly gramattical. But, for some reason, we use "I've got 3 apples". But I think we'd also say "I have 3 apples" and not "I have got 3 apples".

Language is weird.

I'm from England and I'm pretty sure gotten is a normal word here?

> I feel like Canada is of two minds, awkwardly and indecisively straddling North American English and British English

or it's got it's own dialect, which has inherited features from both british and american english but is now evolving on its own.

I'm British and I have sometimes chosen Canadian English as my OS language so that it will not constantly try to correct my usage of z in words like this.

en_CA is used for localization but I have almost never seen it for dictionaries or language, unlike fr_CA.

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