English! Who talks funny?

[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.

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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.