Rudolf Polzer wrote:

>BTW: Do you learn American or British English in Canada? Geographically
>it looks like you learn AE - historically you should be learning BE.
>What's your pronounciation of "can't": [c$(D??(Bnt] or [ca:nt] ($(D??(B is the
>phoneme that is the only vowel of "back")? The former is AE, the latter
>is BE.
>

I believe we learn British English as far as spelling goes, i.e. 
"colour" instead of "color" and what not.  I understand that they used 
to spell the word "tire" as "tyre" but we don't do that anymore.  As for 
the pronunciation we say the former (the one with the umlaut).

>
>And I didn't even take English for 9 years like it's normal in Germany -
>I started, like everybody else, in the 5th form, but stopped after the
>first half of the 12th instead of taking English until my "Abitur"
>(final test at the end of the 13th). I had much better marks in
>Latin (in English my marks were worse than the average) and had to do
>too much for English (especially reading completely uninteresting books
>- the worst example was "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, which is
>so boring that you never should even think about reading it!). So
>instead I concentrated on Latin: less work, better marks.
>

Actually, I read that book in Grade 10... and liked it :)  Horses for 
courses, I guess.

>
>[*]: This again reminds me of a certain thing at the IMO 2002. 
>


Does this mean "International Math Olympiad"?

Richard