Re:Great Vowel Shift
by Veen on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @04:34PM
(#26812686)
It is (or was) considered "lower-class" to drop your Ts in the UK. But these days, it's not fashionable to talk like Boris Johnson, even if you went to Eton, so many upper-middle class people emulate aspects of "lower-class" speech, including the glottalization of "t" when it's followed by an unstressed syllable (like water). Even someone as indisputably posh as Prince Harry will T-glottalize on occasion.
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Re:Great Vowel Shift
by cleansingfire on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @07:14PM
(#26814283)
Not being posh has been fashionable before. A fashion for dropping terminal g existed the upper classes in the 1920's UK. Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey did this, and it was fascinating to hear this affectation in the 1970's BBC adaptations with Ian Carmichael. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/no-g-men-frank-mcnally-on...
Also, there is a backlash against Received Pronunciation as inauthentic. Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.
Famously in "huntin', shootin', and fishin'." But I'm not sure it's the upper classes emulating the lower. It seems to be parallel evolution from different forms of Old English [0]. Which makes sense; it's unlikely an upper-class English person of the 1920s would be motivated to copy lower-class speech patterns. Bertie Wooster wouldn't want to sound like his scullery maid.
[0]: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YMS3AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT26&lpg...
Re:Great Vowel Shift
by brigandish on Thursday April 15, 2021 @12:48AM
(#26816294)
> Now I enjoy BBC announcers with regional accents, unlike the voices I heard on BBC in the seventies and eighties.
I agree. The downside of the loosening of the old standard is heard in the number of actors who mumble through their lines. I wouldn't want to go back to a time when RADA enforced a kind of RP but I would like them to focus just as hard on diction.