Questions for our British friends

[seany65]

Originally Posted by savage560

Did you guys in England,Scotland,Wales,Austrailia, for those of you who speak the Queen's English,realize before the revolutuion here in the States,you spoke English more like we Americans do now & back pre revolution?!

I once heard an Englishman who was an authority on accents & a guest speaker on the WW Radio show Coast to Coast AM,he stated the same.

link:

http://www.livescience.com/33652-ame...s-accents.html

Not sure how they can really know that. It's not as if they've got any recordings. All they can do, is guess as the pronunciation and look at any similar words.

Even if it were true, I for one ain't gonna start reading sheakespeare using an inner voice that speaks like ruddy John Wayne.

[JJ3027]

Originally Posted by 9876543210

JJ3027,



I think I may have seen the same tornado (at least it was about the same time). I was living in N Illinois at the time when the sirens blared and we all headed for the basement. Came up a few minutes later and a small barn behind the house was gone (along with several hundred chickens). The same tornado skipped back up and then went and hit a school in Belvidere, Illinois. Killed a few kids but I don't remember how many. Thats the closest I've ever been to one.

I've seen two others but, like you, wouldn't be bothered a bit to never see another. That dark green sky still sends shivers down my back.

The one I saw hit Oak Lawn on the south side

[pierrelm]

Originally Posted by seany65

Not sure how they can really know that. It's not as if they've got any recordings. All they can do, is guess as the pronunciation and look at any similar words.

Even if it were true, I for one ain't gonna start reading sheakespeare using an inner voice that speaks like ruddy John Wayne.

Given the melting pot of cultures that has formed the US I think that there are two chances of the modern US pronounciation matching our historic language - fat and slim!

The British settlers were mainly Puritan, many of them from the south of England - so unless there are currently non-Amish enclaves full of 'thees' and 'thou's' it seems most unlikely. Our regional accents over here are being eroded at an alarming rate - there's a dreadful introduction of lazy pronounciation, which takes the utmost delight in losing consonants, a perverse dedication to using the word 'like' as a form of gratuitous punctuation and the unwelcome creeping introduction of US terminology, mainly from pop culture - hip hop and west coast vacuuousness. All this coupled with the insidious influence of Estuary English via the television, we'll all end up sounding like ill educated halfwits. We live in a society seemingly embracing the opportunity to dumb down. Innit?

[knobby109]

The Pilgrim Fathers came from Nottinghamshire , is the Notts accent heard in New England?

[sydney1]

Originally Posted by knobby109

The Pilgrim Fathers came from Nottinghamshire , is the Notts accent heard in New England?

Actually, as I stated in a previous post, they were from Scrooby in North Nottinghamshire on the border with Doncaster and Sheffield. The leader was a William Brewster, who was the Bailiff to the Archbishop of York.

So, they would've had accent like the actor Sean Bean. Entirely different from the Southern accent. Blame the movie industry for that common misconception.
Apparently the cult series Game of thrones has quite a few Northern accents in it.
And again a misconception,in that the settlers came from the south,in fact, most of the original settlers came from the North and Midlands of England.

[richardoe]

There was a programme on the History channel recently called "how the states got their shape" and one of the programmes was on accents. There is an island off the Carolinas where the inhabitants speak English as spoken by the original English settlers to that area, they sound west country to me. As for the pilgrim fathers lets not forget they werent the first English immigrants to the new world, and does the Boston accent sound like an east midlands accent???

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by seany65

Not sure how they can really know that. It's not as if they've got any recordings. All they can do, is guess as the pronunciation and look at any similar words.

Even if it were true, I for one ain't gonna start reading sheakespeare using an inner voice that speaks like ruddy John Wayne.

Oh, there are lots of ways to look at the evolution of pronunciation, and we have recorded voices going back a century and more now. Even before you get to recordings, you can see changes in spelling, which reflect how people pronounce things, rhymes, and so on.

There was a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe in London, in the "original pronunciation", what is as close as scholars are able to get to the sound of Shakespeare's English as he would have spoken it.

There's a good video, which describes what we know of "Original Pronunciation" (eg Shakespeare's) sounded like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

They discuss sources for these opinions. For instance, how do we know that speakers of the time pronounced the "R" the way Americans (or some Scots and Irish) do?

One source is contemporary commentators on language -- Ben Jonson, for example, wrote an English grammar in 1623 (revised 1640) which tells us things like that you can hear the final "r" at the end of a word (eg "heer" not "heah")

[GailFan]

Originally Posted by seany65

Not sure how they can really know that. It's not as if they've got any recordings. All they can do, is guess as the pronunciation and look at any similar words.

Poetry is a great way of deciphering how a particular time and place spoke English. Rhyme and metre provide clues as to how the author spoke.

I studied Medieval lit at university, and in one class we were expected to read the texts aloud in the correct accent.

[savage560]

Originally Posted by GailFan

One of those invasions was the Crimea...

Let's call that one even now?

Call it even ,for what reason?Russia still has never invaded England.Was Crimea not part of Russia for a few hundred years?Did the English ever claim stake there?

I guess it depends on ones POV, on if Crimea belongs to Russia or not?Moot point now ,the have it!

[richardoe]

Call me a pedant if you wish, but please can you remember that England and Great Britain are NOT the same thing!!!!