First time I see Germany classified as “a corner of England”, lol.
(To be fair, before the current crop, the English aristocracy spoke mainly French, and I guess France could be classed as “a corner of England” by people still a bit hung-up on the loss of Brittany...)
RP English is heavily influenced by French and Germanic tones. Local dialects are very different. I still find it hard to compare British languages with what developed in North America, where the influence of non-English-speakers was clearly massive. Isn’t it more interesting to look at Australia and South Africa, where direct links with English natives are way more recent, and still the language departed markedly...?
Normandy, not Brittany. Brittany was never part of the English crown, and it was independent from the French crown for a long time as well (de jure not until the French Revolution, although it was de facto part of France for about 250 years prior).
Fair point. In my head the two tend to merge into an unicuum, but that's not the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...
Hence… 'A' is for aardvaark.
It's true to the extent that, as the article notes, the dominant British accent used to be rhotic (probounced-r) like General American, but became non-rhotic as a result of upper class fashion (which was copied in some parts of the US, producing the modern Boston accent, among others.)
But both sets of accents have evolved considerably otherwise, so it's not really true broadly, as best I understand.
This was because Bristol in particular was a major sea hub in colonial-era England, much moreso than London. As an interesting side note, Americans know the West Country accent as the "pirate accent" thanks to the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island, where Robert Newton played Long John Silver and managed to convince the director to let him use his native Dorset accent because he thought it would be more historically accurate than the RP accent the director originally wanted him to do, and his portrayal was so iconic that pretty much every pirate story since has used some variation on Newton's accent.
As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works.
It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.)
Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that.
Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two.
So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well.
> As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist.
No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do).
It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.
† Which made English less-Germanic sounding, at least to my ears.
†† In my humble opinion modern British English sounds marginally more Germanic than American English.
This should be one of the first things that gets hammered home when learning the first foreign language.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
Same with Canadian French.
Wouldn't you then expect a small isolated town in England to still have an "American" accent?
But you definitely find, for example, places in England where "r"s at the ends of words or before consonants are pronounced, like in America but unlike in RP.
Specifically in the west country of England. This accent was borrowed by Hollywood to create what we know today as the "pirate" accent.
This is mass broadcast media playing to Americans' biases around the eliteness of English accents. This effect is at least as old as cross Atlantic broadcast media, heard until a few decades ago in the artificial Mid-Atlantic accents of the east coast elites.
On the other hand, to many in the UK, when watching a show like Game of Thrones, the Northmen sound like modern blokes from Yorkshire, not some kind of medieval people.
The article says basically the same thing (in its discussion of rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents). So the article's title is misleading: it should really be "When Did the British Gain Their British Accents?"
"Various claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists. "
By the way, the term "Old English" strictly speaking refers to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English. No-one is claiming that Americans speak this language.
IOW, Parisian French also retains some primitive features that have largely disappeared from one Canadian region or another. But we don't talk about those as much. I'm guessing because doing so wouldn't jive well with certain stereotypes about Québec being a backwards hinterland.
This is simply nonsense.
That the current accent is driven by a particular fad aimed at highlighting upper class status doesn't imply that class distinctions are novel, just the particular effort to demarcate them (which wasn't durable, obviously, as RP isn't exclusive to the upper classes.)
No one, AFAICT, did that. The reference to “modern British English” is not, as I read it, a reference to “the current diversity of British accents”, but rather “the current dominant British accent”.
Fair point - I would also agree that the idea of a "dominant" British accent seems a bit odd - certainly not in terms of what people actually sound like (rather than the broadcast media).
In a highly class-conscious society where the vast majority of people spoke English as their first language, it seems fairly unlikely that accent would have had no connotation of social status.
It thus seems hard to believe that the development of the modern diversity of English dialects would have been spurred by some sudden need to mark class distinctions.
Believe it or not, there is an entire field called linguistics that studies human language and how it evolves.
In terms of lexicon, much of the archaic flavour is actually the result of 19th-century language reformers trying to restore old words. In the meantime, Icelandic had borrowed heavily from Danish.
Indeed, there is the field of linguistics, and scholarly treatments of Icelandic (as opposed to pop-sci presentations of the language as a time capsule like yours) point out that Icelandic has undergone a great deal of innovation like any other North Germanic language.