>> >1)I have been in downtown. >> >2)I have been to downtown.
>> >Both sentences show that I'm not in downtown now. >> >How different are they in what each means?
>> Neither would be heard in the US. Americans would say "I have been >> downtown" or "I have been in (or "to") the downtown area".
>Quite so.
>How about this?
>I have been in the countryside. >I have been to the countryside.
>How are they different?
Different in that they would probably appear in different context. The first would probably be in some context where a prolonged visit to the countryside was being described, and the second indicates only a short visit to the countryside.
However, you can't take a single sentence and say that it *always* belongs in this context or that context, or that this or that particular meaning applies.
Both sentences could be used in describing either a prolonged visit or a brief visit. One might be more *likely* to be in a particular context, but it's not a clear thing. Sentences like those do not tell you much about context.
Cece wrote: > On Jan 12, 1:14 pm, Masa <aut...@infoseek.jp> wrote: >>>> 1)I have been in downtown. 2)I have been to downtown. Both >>>> sentences show that I'm not in downtown now. How different are >>>> they in what each means? >>> Neither would be heard in the US. Americans would say "I have >>> been downtown" or "I have been in (or "to") the downtown area". >> Quite so.
>> How about this?
>> I have been in the countryside. I have been to the countryside.
>> How are they different?
> Good question. As a native speaker of English, I don't know why > "downtown" and "the countryside" are treated differently; I just know > they are.
> It's so hard to explain things that have always been taken for > granted!
The difference is that "the countryside" is a noun phrase and can quite naturally be governed by a preposition like "in", while "downtown" is an adverb in the sentence "I've been downtown" (like "I've been away").
>Cece wrote: >> On Jan 12, 1:14 pm, Masa <aut...@infoseek.jp> wrote: >>>>> 1)I have been in downtown. 2)I have been to downtown. Both >>>>> sentences show that I'm not in downtown now. How different are >>>>> they in what each means? >>>> Neither would be heard in the US. Americans would say "I have >>>> been downtown" or "I have been in (or "to") the downtown area".
>The difference is that "the countryside" is a noun phrase and can quite >naturally be governed by a preposition like "in", while "downtown" is an >adverb in the sentence "I've been downtown" (like "I've been away").
I can't rule out the possibility that some city describes a certain district as "Downtown" (like San Diego has "The Gaslamp Quarter" or Scottsdale "The Couplet")...in that case, you might very well hear a resident say either "I've been to Downtown" or "I've been in Downtown"....r
-- A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optometrist asks whether you see the glass more full like this?...or like this?
>1) I have been in the countryside. >2)I have been in the countryside for two months.
>2) This means I have lived there since two months ago, and I'm still >there, right?
>but, in 1), I'm not in the countryside now.
>By the way, >about I have been downtown,
>you couldt distinguish whether I have been (to) downdown, or I have >been (in) downtown. >How do you tell apart?
Context. I'm sorry to keep using that word, but you seem not to be aware that we can't effectively deal with sentences isolated from their context.
"I've been to the downtown area" *usually* means that the person is indicating that he's at least visited the downtown area in question and is familiar with it. "I've been in the downtown area" *usually* means that the person has just returned from that area and is explaining where he's been.
But...but...but...but, either interpretation could be the opposite of what I've said based on context.
It just isn't going to work if you insist on trying to find specific changes of meaning of a sentence based on changing one word like this.
In article <hiir0c0...@drn.newsguy.com>, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>I can't rule out the possibility that some city describes a certain district as >"Downtown"
Um, Manhattan? Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown, all without a preposition. I don't know about Atlanta, though. Any Atlantans here?
-GAWollman
-- Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft woll...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
Garrett Wollman wrote: > R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote: > >I can't rule out the possibility that some city describes a certain district as > >"Downtown" > Um, Manhattan? Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown, all without a > preposition.
Midtown without a preposition? I'm going midtown? I've been midtown? I don't think so.
When I lived in Houston, where Downtown is in the middle, "in Downtown" or "to Downtown" was common. In Poughkeepsie, too, to some extent, to differentiate Downtown from Lower Main Street farther down. In Kingston, Uptown is very definitely a place and not a direction, Midtown lies above Uptown, and downtown doesn't really mean anything at all.
DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. Because we don't have a word equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. But I have rarely come across "inner city".
On Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:29:31 -0800 (PST), Masa <aut...@infoseek.jp> wrote:
>DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. >Because we don't have a word >equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. >But I have rarely come across "inner city".
I don't know what "inner city" connotes in Japan, but in the US it is the part of the city that is the periphery of the downtown area that has fallen into urban decay; the slums in most cities. It's almost a code term for "the area where poor blacks live".
Therefore, if - in Japan - the "inner city" is highly urban but a respectable, high-rent area, you would not want to tell an American you live in the inner city.
> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. > Because we don't have a word > equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. > But I have rarely come across "inner city".
"Downtown" is mostly an American English word. You will hear "inner city" in other English-speaking countries. Sometimes we also call it the CBD, which stands for "central business district".
In Australia, "I went into town" is one common way of describing a trip to the inner city.
-- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
On 2010-01-13 09:09:10 +0100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep> said:
> On 13/01/10 16:29, Masa wrote: >> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. >> Because we don't have a word >> equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. >> But I have rarely come across "inner city".
> "Downtown" is mostly an American English word.
I was going to say this, but you've beaten me to it. In BrE I would say that "uptown" and "midtown" are not used at all, and "downtown" is much less common (and less precise) than it is in AmE. You'd never use it as an adjective in BrE.
> You will hear "inner > city" in other English-speaking countries. Sometimes we also call it the > CBD, which stands for "central business district".
> In Australia, "I went into town" is one common way of describing a trip > to the inner city.
> On 2010-01-13 09:09:10 +0100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep> said:
>> On 13/01/10 16:29, Masa wrote: >>> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. >>> Because we don't have a word >>> equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. >>> But I have rarely come across "inner city".
>> "Downtown" is mostly an American English word.
> I was going to say this, but you've beaten me to it. In BrE I would say > that "uptown" and "midtown" are not used at all, and "downtown" is much > less common (and less precise) than it is in AmE. You'd never use it as an > adjective in BrE.
Agreed. One might, of course, go down town in colloquial BrE, but it would always be two words.
On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:29:31 UTC, Masa <aut...@infoseek.jp> wrote: > DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. > Because we don't have a word > equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. > But I have rarely come across "inner city".
Cities in the US are young enough that original settlement patterns still govern modern urban organization and nomenclature.
Because there were no roads, early settlements in the US were located on rivers. As a settlement grew into a town and then a city, it tended to expand upriver because the water there had not been fouled by the town and its port. Or, in some places like Boston, expansion was only possible upriver. "Uptown" and "downtown" are relative to flow of the river. The earlier settled part of the city, the downtown, would contain the business and governmental districts, while uptown would be more residential.
Many cities that were not located on rivers adopted the "downtown" nomenclature to mean the business district or the older part of the city.
-- John Varela Trade NEWlamps for OLDlamps for email
On Jan 13, 10:09 am, Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 2010-01-13 09:09:10 +0100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep> said:
> > On 13/01/10 16:29, Masa wrote: > >> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. > >> Because we don't have a word > >> equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. > >> But I have rarely come across "inner city".
> > "Downtown" is mostly an American English word.
> I was going to say this, but you've beaten me to it. In BrE I would say > that "uptown" and "midtown" are not used at all, and "downtown" is much > less common (and less precise) than it is in AmE. You'd never use it as > an adjective in BrE.
Uptown is not particularly common as a location designation in AmE. Downtown is very commonplace, even in relatively small towns. "I'm going downtown" is a normal AmE phrase; I'd have a sense of what it meant in nearly any US town or city.
"I'm going uptown" is meaningless, in general, except in a handful of cities that have a region designated by the name "Uptown"--to most people in the US, if you said "I just returned from uptown" the assumption would be that you'd returned from a visit to Upper Manhattan in New York City (unless their town or city had its own "uptown"). As as place designation, it's almost like "Soho"--it's not a well-defined general English word, but if you're in one of many cities such as London, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, or Birmingham that has an area by that name, saying "I'm headed to Soho" makes sense. If not, saying "I'm headed to Soho" means you're taking a trip to London (if you're in the UK) or to New York (if you're in the USA).
"Uptown" does have another meaning in AmE, though; it's synonymous with "posh" or "upscale", because by far the most widely recognized "uptown" area in the country is the affluent Upper Manhattan section of New York City. Billy Joel's song "Uptown Girl" is probably partially responsible for popularizing this meaning.
As a term indicating location, Wikipedia lists 16 cities with "uptowns" in the United States. That's a very permissive list, though; I've lived for over 6 years in two of the cities that are listed (Pittsburgh and Washington, DC), and even in those cities, I think that without specific context most people would assume anyone using "uptown" was referring to Manhattan. If you said you were headed uptown in Pittsburgh or DC, I'd have only the vaguest idea what you were talking about--it's certainly not a currently used term among the people I know in either city.
On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:09:10 +1100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep> wrote:
>On 13/01/10 16:29, Masa wrote: >> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. >> Because we don't have a word >> equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. >> But I have rarely come across "inner city".
>"Downtown" is mostly an American English word. You will hear "inner >city" in other English-speaking countries. Sometimes we also call it the >CBD, which stands for "central business district".
>In Australia, "I went into town" is one common way of describing a trip >to the inner city.
For Canberra, we go to "Civic". -- Richard Bollard Canberra Australia
>On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:09:10 +1100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep> >wrote:
>>On 13/01/10 16:29, Masa wrote: >>> DOWNTOWN is not so easy to understand in our way of terminology. >>> Because we don't have a word >>> equivalent to downtown, while we have one for INNER CITY. >>> But I have rarely come across "inner city".
>>"Downtown" is mostly an American English word. You will hear "inner >>city" in other English-speaking countries. Sometimes we also call it the >>CBD, which stands for "central business district".
>>In Australia, "I went into town" is one common way of describing a trip >>to the inner city.
>For Canberra, we go to "Civic".
In Phoenix, we go to "Downtown", except that nobody goes there....r
-- A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optometrist asks whether you see the glass more full like this?...or like this?
On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:09:10 +1100, Peter Moylan wrote: >"Downtown" is mostly an American English word. You will hear "inner >city" in other English-speaking countries.
"Inner city" usually has a different meaning for Americans: a former business center now in decay, the rough part of town.
El Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:55:25 -0500, tony cooper escribió:
> Neither would be heard in the US. Americans would say "I have been > downtown" or "I have been in (or "to") the downtown area".
As a kid, watching the american cops & robbers series, I always thought "downtown" meant the police station. "You're coming downtown" (cop to the robber).
> El Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:55:25 -0500, tony cooper escribió:
>> Neither would be heard in the US. Americans would say "I have been >> downtown" or "I have been in (or "to") the downtown area".
> As a kid, watching the american cops & robbers series, I always thought > "downtown" meant the police station. "You're coming downtown" (cop to the > robber).
These very common phrases are, precisely because they are common, usually used without explanation. Why would you feel the need to explain anything in the "everybody knows it" category? This can cause confusion when somebody who doesn't know it arrives on the scene.
Allan Sherman's song "Harvey and Sheila" contains the lines
Switched to the GOP That's the way things go.
to describe what happened as H&S became more prosperous. When I first heard this, I didn't have a clue as to what the GOP might be. I worked it out from context, though. The words "That's the way things go" obviously referred to things flushed out of the house. From this it was clear to me that the GOP was some sort of sewage treatment works. I already knew that Americans had more than one phone company, so it seemed likely that they would also have a choice of which company to connect their toilet pipes to.
Looking back at this, I'm starting to wonder whether I was right about the phone companies. The present state of play here is that I'm free to give my business to one of about a hundred phone companies, and this remains true even in small towns. From comments I've read in this newsgroup, I have the impression that small-town Americans have a very limited choice of phone companies, and that some companies might even have a monopoly in some areas.
How close am I to the truth? I have to admit that the left-winger in me can accept the notion of a state monopoly - because that's subject to voter control - but is horrified by the thought of a private company monopoly. I suppose, though, that the latter would be more acceptable in an area dominated by right-leaning voters.
-- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
