[AR] pronunciation (was Re: recycling...)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2020 15:42:16 -0400 (EDT)
On Sun, 14 Jun 2020, Rand Simberg wrote:
Speaking of Shakespeare, apparently the spoken English of Elizabethan times
more resembled modern American, and all these modern actors using modern
English accents are mispronouncing it, and losing a lot of the plays on
words. Probably not true any more, but in the early 20th century, the most
authentic Elizabethan English could be found in the remote hollows of
Appalachia, where the Scots Irish had settled in the late 17th century.
Quite by chance, today I ran into
<
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/when-did-americans-lose-their-british-accents>,
which says:
"...[due to lack of sound recording before 1860] we can't say exactly when
Americans first started to sound noticeably different from the British.
"As for the "why," though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents
is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce
the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic,
and speakers don't pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd.
Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England
and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don't know much
more about said accent, though. 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...
"Around the turn of the 18th-19th century, not long after the revolution,
non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper
and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This
posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely
by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak
fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally
"neutral" and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire
through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.
"Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received
Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the
port cities that still had close trading ties with England — Boston,
Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP
sound spread through much of the South...
"After industrialization and the Civil War and well into the 20th century,
political and economic power largely passed from the port cities and
cotton regions to the manufacturing hubs of the Mid Atlantic and Midwest —
New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, etc. The
British elite had much less cultural and linguistic influence in these
places, which were mostly populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers
from Northern Britain, and rhotic English was still spoken there. As
industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political
elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation lost its status and
fizzled out in the U.S. [with some exceptions, just like there are still
areas in England with rhotic accents]."
Henry
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