English! Who talks funny?

[Fisherking]

The linguists of today do believe they can deduce what English sounded like at different periods.

Without getting into all of the particulars of a complex subject they have deduced, baring regional variances that the language would have sounded, at least to my ear from the descriptions I have read, much like that portrayed in the Beverly Hillbillies. Words like join and poison would have sounded to us like jine and pison.

One of the descriptions I read, attributed to Robert Burchfield, also stated that George Washington would have sounded much like Lord North, but Lord North would have sounded much more American in his speech. North would have pronounced path and bath in the American way. He would have given necessary its full value. He would have given r’s their full value in words like cart and horse. And he would have used many words that later fell out of use in England but were preserved in the New World.

In early 1791, Dr. David Ramsay, one of the first American Historians, noted in his book The History of the American Revelation that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which he attributed to the fact that people from all over Britain were thrown together in America where they dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all.

Odd words were what early America was noted for not odd ways of speaking the language. But then again some of those odd words were words simply gone old fashioned in England.