English! Who talks funny?

[Fisherking]

This topic originally came up in another thread but it is one very interesting to at least some of us, so I decided to continue it here.

Which version of English is the older? American English or British English.

On the surface it would surely be that of the Mother Land, but is that really so?

Linguists tell us otherwise. They say that the American English is nearer to the way English was spoken at the time of the American Revolution than that still spoken in the UK.

But hay! Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. What do you think?

English is a language spoken or understood by at the very least 500 million people, and some of the variances are astounding.

[Fisherking]

QUOTE=Fisherking;2126649]Nice thread therifleman, welcome aboard!


Just a tiny bit off topic here but didn’t anyone else notice that the Americans had a pronounced English Accent?

The fact that neither one of them used that accent at the time might also be mentioned.

[/QUOTE]

Well, since we have no idea what either nation sounded like at the time, it is probabaly best to go with well known one, still I would be interested to know if you had any suggestions?

We do have an idea what they sounded like. An upper class accent from Charleston, SC or Savanna, GA are good examples of the educated, working class Dublin for others, (non French) Canadian may be more toward a universal English sound nearer to then, but not the best idea for the game.

But different from one another might be desirable…at least for the game.

Of course this may be an early on press demo so it could have changed…I hope!

To those born west of the pond, it is a bit like having General Wellington have the same speech patterns as Crocodile Dundee would be to you.

Plus at the time of the mod the colonists probably did sound much more like the english than americans.

no, it would have been the other way round, The English sounded more like Americans than they do today…[/QUOTE]

How so?

To make it a story; some time ( I think in the 1820s but it may have been later) the English upper class began to speak in what they thought was a more elegant fashion. They modified the vowel sounds and lengthened them and began to clip some words. This in turn trickled down into the lower levels of society. (the first time in history that it went form the top down) The shift in pronunciation resulted in what we today think of as the British Accent.

Americans and to a lesser extent Canadians did not go through this shift, retaining the older form of the language. Spelling was also not firmly fixed resulting in different ways of spelling the same words.
So as much as the British love to make fun of their cousins across the sea, they speak a much more recent variety of the language.

If you want further information one book is , I believe, “The Story of English”. There are many others, and like this one written primarily by British Authors.

I hope I have answered the question.

Wow i didn't know that, thanks for the info, you have opened my eyes to something i never considered, but what about the current american accent (generic one that is) is it close to what would be the old english one?

The most Archaic accents are those from the rural southern US. (other than the real Dublin Accent that is, ) Many of the word pronunciations , word use, and phraseology my be Elizabethan. So the back woods frontier accents are the oldest. The Dublin Accent is thought to be the oldest form still spoken, but it may have more word meanings and phrases at its root than the pronunciation.
The Generic American Accent goes back to the brake with England and you can see the similarities with Canadian English. Also Americans had fixed their spelling of words prior to the Revelation.

I am afraid that sounds a bit off to me, you see, wherever you go throughout the old Empire, people of British descent sound different. Now, you cannot tell me that the English aristocracy decided to change the way it spoke everytime there was a large influx of Brits to the colonies?

Now, there was study, a very good one, done recently about the European NZ accent, it has now been proved that it is slowly changing and moving away from what it originally was. This would indicate that in fact, all those departed from their ancestral homeland, have also gone through the same process.

If you here a recording of a kiwi from the end of the 19th cen. they sound like either Scots, English or Irish. They clearly no longer do, thus I would, by simple application of logic, have to refuse to accept such a hypothesis, to boot that book is now over twenty years old and its research is probably a bit long in the tooth.

There are also, so many ancient regional accents in Britain that it is impossible to state that the English accent has lossed its historical roots through an aristocratice revolution of pronounciation, it simply cannot be true that the farmers I met in Cornwall are the end effect of such a thing. I can hardly understand them, same goes for the boys up north. These accents and dialects are ancient and reach well beyond the founding of the U.S.A.

This should bring us up to where we were before!


I am not going to pretend to have all the answers to this question.

I have read that there are more than 30 distinct dialects in England and Wales, and the Author said he thought it was a vast under estimate.

I could agree with him. Here where I live now every single village has a different version of their dialect. (even though it is not English) I see no reason to doubt that to some extent that is true in the UK as well.

As close as I can estimate the sounds of the English spoken in the late 1700s is that it would sound much like what you would call an American “Red Neck” or Hill Billy English.

[CountArach]

They say that the American English is nearer to the way English was spoken at the time of the American Revolution than that still spoken in the UK.

And American English derived from...?

That's right! English!

[Fisherking]

And American English derived from...?

That's right! English!

And English derived from German…

So?

English is to Brittan as English is to America…an ancestral Language.

England is a small part of the UK

Everything changes. Just because England is the origin of English doesn’t dictate ownership.

[Flavius Clemens]

You may find this blog of interest - I came across it last week and have been reading through the past entries ever since. It's by an American linguist working at an English university (and married to one of us too) who has also worked in South Africa.

http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/

A number of the articles talk about the historical differences in accent and usage either side of the Atlantic and which modern usages are rooted in British usage of centuries past. Some of the comments are by professional linguists and go over my head, but most are intelligible to lay people. She does on occasion post articles to answer questions sent in by email (but not quickly - the most recent posting begins "How to choose among the dozens and dozens of unfulfilled requests? I just clicked blindly in my inbox and found American ex-pat Liz being driven crazy/mad (in 2007!)")

Whilst (and writing that reminds me of her post here http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.bl...06/whilst.html) it is good to remember English shouldn't be used as a synonym for British, describing England as a small part of the UK is an exaggeration. Wikipedia gives 2006 population figures showing England as having 83.8% of the total UK population

[Fisherking]

Whilst (and writing that reminds me of her post here http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.bl...06/whilst.html) it is good to remember English shouldn't be used as a synonym for British, describing England as a small part of the UK is an exaggeration. Wikipedia gives 2006 population figures showing England as having 83.8% of the total UK population

Thank you Flavius Clemens for the links!

Sorry to trim your post a bit but I wanted to apologize if I offended anyone with the comment.

That was mostly directed to our Australian college.


It was meant Geographically and it seems to get smaller all the time. Wales doesn’t wish to be included and Cornwall seems to have its own separatist movement…

At any rate a Yorkshire man and a Devonshire man do speak the same language, but in much different ways…Deciding which of them is more English would insult one of both, wouldn’t you say?

The Scotts once claimed there version as Scottish and forbade the speaking of the Irish-Language (Gaelic) in public places.

[InsaneApache]

I may talk the same language as a Devonian but the dialect and accent (emphesis) is vastly different.

Si thi.

[Juvenal]

I recall watching a TV documentary series on the subject of the diaspora of English dialects. It must have been a good 10-15 years ago, but it left a strong impression on me. I don't recall the name of the presenter (who was also the writer), but I think he was American or maybe Canadian.

The series began in a community of clam fishermen on the USA eastern seaboard. They spoke with an accent very close to the Cornish accent in England today - quite a shock to my pre-conceived notions about US accents garnered from the output from Hollywood.

I learned from the series that modern English accents are substantially derived from the timing and the nature of the people who made up the bulk of the original migrants from the British Isles.

When England first established its American colonies in what is now the South, the prevalent English dialect was close to the modern West Country. The familiar Southern drawl is a development of this, while the clam fishermen speak a less altered form.

The New England colonisation came to a large extent from people living in the East Midlands and East Anglia (religious non-conformists). Even today, this area has a very different accent to West Country, and the distinctive New England accent is a development of it.

The "Hill-Billy" accent was also examined, and this is closely related to the modern Ulster accent, thanks to the great numbers of "Scotch-Irish" who settled that region.

Moving on to the New Commonwealth, the Australian accent seems to stem from Irish and (Cockney) London roots (thanks to the great numbers of transportees). New Zealand and South African English also seem to be London-accent based, although from a later wave of immigration (South African being strongly influenced by the Dutch of the Voortrekkers).

Meanwhile English accents in Britain have changed, as described earlier, we seem to be emerging now from the strait-jacket of Received Pronunciation (BBC English), and there is a flowering of different dialects appearing on TV these days.

...The Scotts once claimed there version as Scottish and forbade the speaking of the Irish-Language (Gaelic) in public places.

The original language of the Scots was Gallic (a derivative of Gaelic, since the Scotti tribes originated in Ulster). But this was later supplanted by an English dialect called "Lowland Scots", which is what is mainly spoken today.

This change was due to the internal power-struggle between the Gallic Magnates and the Stewart dynasty in the 15/16th Century, nothing to do with the English.

[Ibrahim]

This topic originally came up in another thread but it is one very interesting to at least some of us, so I decided to continue it here.

Which version of English is the older? American English or British English.

On the surface it would surely be that of the Mother Land, but is that really so?

Linguists tell us otherwise. They say that the American English is nearer to the way English was spoken at the time of the American Revolution than that still spoken in the UK.

But hay! Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. What do you think?

English is a language spoken or understood by at the very least 500 million people, and some of the variances are astounding.

I can answer that in some detail:

its true, none of the major dialects are exactly the same as they would have been centuries ago, but the ages (relatively) of major dialects is decernable. here is the order (with c. divergeance). I base this on my personal observations BTW, so its not meant to be accurate.

1-Irish english (I cannot date it with approx.). rhotic or partially so, a few archaisms, still distant.

2-North American English (in general: canadian or US). Rhotic, dipthonizing has begun for the some lower vowels in middle english (in stone, day, etc). diverged in the early to mid eighteenth century. some dialects from there became non rhotic independently of british english (in new england, it was dropped by the 1770's, as evidenced by the spelling of some names from then (hitchborn spelled roughly hitchbon)

3-Australian english: non-rhotic, from the late eighteenth/early ninteenth century onwards.

4-new zealand: mid nineteenth century onwards, also non rhotic.

5-British english: latest dialect, believe it or not.

here is a chart for the shifts in prunounciation:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._Shift.svg.png

conlusion: none of the dialects mentioned is the same as the "standard" english of even the eighteenth century (there never reallywas until later), but as you have seen, rhotic dialects are typically older than non-rhotic diaects, hence American english is older than british english (of today's form of course).

EDIT: in my case, I pronounce settlers as sɛtlɜ̝:ɹ (the t is weak though. the ɜ̝: is not an accurate representation)

[King Jan III Sobieski]

I thought American and British were different languages!