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"Because its an iPhone, it can do what no other phone can"....crop, rotate, remove red eye, and tweet photo. No other phone can do that?

"And because it's an iPhone, you can do things NO ORDINARY CAMERA CAN DO"

can your point and shoot crop and tweet?

..lol you gotta pay attention to the words
 
Does anyone else find it annoying that Apple shows a 7 year old kid with an iPhone4S? I mean, seriously... im 27, and I don't even own an iphone yet. No parent is going to buy their kid an iphone, and if they do, they are either very welthy (slim-chance), or they are just bad parents. When the real world hits this kid later on in life in his late teens when he has to personally pay for his cell phone bill, lets see if hes still rocking a data hungry expensive smartphone.
 
How the hell did that little kid get his iPhone sooner then me... en how the hell can he afford it.

He doesn't even sleeve it for protection...

pfff
 
This is the 2nd wrong use of "their" in two pages of a single thread. Is it really that hard to learn the difference? It seems like such an enormous struggle for people nowadays. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. I just don't understand the challenge. I don't know.

Anyway, how would Apple make Siri's voice more fluid? Is it even possible since she has to piece together individual words instead of just set phrases?

As a non-native English speaker myself, I find it even harder to understand those "challenges" some native speakers are facing, simply because even for me I find the differences fairly obvious. Maybe I'm old-fashioned too.

As for Siri's voice, maybe they can improve on her intonation and length of pauses between words?
 
I wish America had declared our variant of English our own as well. There was an effort early on to differentiate our version from the UK but it never fully took off. It's too bad. It would have eliminated the need for Brits to look down their noses at us and declare our language a bastardized form of their own. That's such an arrogant, ignorant attitude that it makes me sick. And there's no shortage of abuse to the language outside the States... unless someone wants to explain to me where the 'f' is in lieutenant.

Personally I don't care about the dialects. Language is a constantly evolving thing and it's natural that geographically separated people will evolve the language over different paths. That's how new languages (including English) are born.

That said, the arrogance thing can go both ways you know. The amount of times that I hear Americans mock other dialects is astounding. Personally as an Australian, I think the height of arrogance is that fact that US software companies (Apple and Microsoft are both guilty of this) categorise US English is 'English' and other dialects as variants like 'British English' and 'Australian English'. The amount of times and places I have to change the language settings form 'English' to 'Australian English' is quite frustrating.

I think you would find that the above reason is the thing that really gets under the English peoples skin. The fact that the Americans have taken the English language, declare their own dialect to be the base 'English' and treat the English dialect as a quant, little variant that does funny things like add 'u' to words.

But meh, people will always find something to complain about.

As for the 'f' in lieutenant, that's just a relic from the Old French pronunciation from which the word was loaned from a very, very, very long time ago where languages were very different from what they are today.

No one has ever said the English language was perfect :p
 
Does anyone else find it annoying that Apple shows a 7 year old kid with an iPhone4S? I mean, seriously... im 27, and I don't even own an iphone yet. No parent is going to buy their kid an iphone, and if they do, they are either very welthy (slim-chance), or they are just bad parents. When the real world hits this kid later on in life in his late teens when he has to personally pay for his cell phone bill, lets see if hes still rocking a data hungry expensive smartphone.


Did it ever occur to you that he was using his parents phone?
 
I'm still using an iPhone 4, but all of this siri talk really makes me want a 4S ugh!
It's a bit of fun, but after you've played with it for a while the novelty wears off! It's just a sell-in gimmick at the moment. Don't get me wrong it's really clever, but I can't see my life has improved particularly because of it... ;)
 
I'm still amazed at Siri!

So am I! ... They use it as a major marketing tool to sell iPhone 4S ...But if you live outside the US, or don't have the 'right' accent it doesn't work well AND they hide behind the 'beta' word if you complain... bit rubbish really

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"And because it's an iPhone, you can do things NO ORDINARY CAMERA CAN DO"

can your point and shoot crop and tweet?

..lol you gotta pay attention to the words


I know, people should, hence why most of the public are sucked into these commercials... Then companies hide behind them. By using the words carefully whilst the camera app is being used your brain kicks in that it beats other camera phones...

Clever and evil really... Rather like using an app such as Siri as a major marketing tool for iPhone 4S and it not working with certain accents and nationalities then hiding behing the 'beta' word ;-)
 
Actually, although both have evolved over time, modern American English is believed to be closer to what was spoken before our countries divided than modern British English.

As a linguist and English teacher from England, who teaches over the world your quote is foolish and ill researched. English has never omitted 'U' from words, or had any other words than what things are.

The US have added words to their spoken English and on the whole mingled the intonation with a lot of Italian and Irish accent and dialect. Outside the US there is a big difference in the 2 in fact the US way of grammar is taught as 'American English'

So as it is true that the US has developed it's own ways to speak English, it is no-where near as to what 'used' to be spoken. After all what 'did' used to be spoken in England, especially if you go to Lancashire and East London, then compare to grammatically correct 'Queen's' English?
 
This is obviously off topic but nonetheless interesting.



I agree. But your assertion that American English is closer to "what was spoken before" than British English is too strong a claim.

It's not my claim, but rather one made by historians like Paul Johnson (an Englishman BTW). The most noticeable thing is that American accents have generally retained rhotic... that is they pronounce "R" before a consonant... whereas british accents generally have not.
 
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I'm waiting on the "English Weegie" setting for Siri.

User: "Pyoor burstin' fur a pish, where's the nearest bog, hen"?

Siri: "A'fun this fur ye, the nearest bog is up aheid ... there's a lane oan yer right hawn side ye can nip in tae fur a quick slash".

Now, that's not going to happen. The good people over at Apple will not tolerate any form of fragmentation of the English language.

:D
 
There's more than one African American person in this world, by the way.

WTF-EVER!!!

Clearly, he/she didn't make that remark because the guy in the commercial is black. The man does, indeed, sound like Obama and also bears a resemblance to him. GET OVER IT. It's amazing how quickly people try to whip out their race cards or make ignorant comments like yours.

I, too, couldn't help but think of Obama when I saw that commercial. Does it mean I think ALL black people look the same, or there's only a handful of them in the world? Get real!
 
It's not my claim, but rather one made by historians like Paul Johnson (an Englishman BTW). The most noticeable thing is that American accents have generally retained rhotic... that is they pronounce "R" before a consonant... whereas british accents generally have not.

Also, both Englishes usually used "z" in words where British English now uses s (e.g. capitalize, authorize).

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That said, the arrogance thing can go both ways you know. The amount of times that I hear Americans mock other dialects is astounding. Personally as an Australian, I think the height of arrogance is that fact that US software companies (Apple and Microsoft are both guilty of this) categorise US English is 'English' and other dialects as variants like 'British English' and 'Australian English'. The amount of times and places I have to change the language settings form 'English' to 'Australian English' is quite frustrating.

Siri lists "English - United States," "English - United Kingdom," and "English - Australia" as its choices. Microsoft Office 2007 does the same thing.
 
Am I the only one who seems to not care about Siri? Its just a feature I don't really care about. I turn her off.
 
Although I agree with your push for a more natural voice for Siri, you've lost credibility. This is the 2nd wrong use of "their" in two pages of a single thread. Is it really that hard to learn the difference? It seems like such an enormous struggle for people nowadays. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. I just don't understand the challenge. I don't know.
As much as it irritates me too, I've come to learn it's primarily a failing of the English language more than anything. People rarely misspell words in any other language, and no other countries in the world hold spelling bees (because nobody would lose). English is the only language that is unphonetic in its spellings. A problem not only for new learners but even native speakers, children especially. A lot of school bodies have actually pushed for phonetisizing — or should I say fonetisizing — English spellings but there isn't enough interest in it.

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The fact that the Americans have taken the English language, declare their own dialect to be the base 'English' and treat the English dialect as a quant, little variant that does funny things like add 'u' to words.
As far as the English language goes, that is pretty unusual. The only reason British English puts 'u' in colour or 's' in realise was to appease the French a long, long time ago. Originally those words were as the American spellings are: color and realize. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary never recognized the new spellings of certain words... Look up 'realise' on the OED website — it won't come up; 'realize', however, is there.

So in that sense, the other poster was correct in saying American is more true English than British English. Which is probably why you need to change the language settings to 'Australian English'.

PS I'm British.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Cool weegiemac I don't think our American friends would understand that never mind Siri perhaps you could translate for them lol noohowsfura gander at that its stotin init!goin yersel Siri your puir dead brilliant

:D Shame you got marked down mate, "stotin init", lol.

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pretty sure your "friends" who speak proper English detest that chav **** too

And that's where you show your utter ignorance.

I posted in how Glaswegian "sounds" when spoken in it's most native form.

Not "ned", not "chav", just local dialect.

"A kin sit here n'talk aboot how ignorant ye ur, but then ye'd jist go in a wee cream puff".

Don't be so ignorant. Local dialect and accent is not the same as a Glasgow Ned. It's NOWHERE near the same.
 
So in that sense, the other poster was correct in saying American is more true English than British English. Which is probably why you need to change the language settings to 'Australian English'.

PS I'm British.

This is interesting. When it comes to grammar, I have always thaugt of American English as a bastardisation of UK English.
 
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