old english accent was closer to American southern accent

[gturner]

Not all the vowels shifted quite soon enough. "Varsity" sports froze the previous pronunciation of "university", as did Southern "rasslin'" (now a regular feature on the SyFy channel). "Wrastling" was preserved because the people who wrassled weren't the ones reading and writing about it. My dad once looked through one of my tree-finder books for a local plant called "sarvice-berry". The closest the book listed was something called "service-berry" so I asked him how he used to pronounce "service". He immediately said, "goods and sarvices." (I grew up three miles from Cumberland Gap, where Daniel Boone came through to Kentucky).

I once memorized about 30 minutes of the Fagles translation of the Illiad and used to crack my friends up by starting out with a sonorous, Harvard voice - "Rage, sing the rage of Peleuses son, Achilles" then kick into a deep, deep Eastern Kentucky hillbilly accent for certain characters. Imagine a deep woods hick saying "So tell me, Agamemnon..." kind of like Festus on Gunsmoke, but worse.

There is a version of Shakespeare done in what is as close to the original accent as linguists can get, and some of the non-rhymes become rhymes again. I think it might be on Youtube.

 

[gturner]

Well, go see a production at Eastern Kentucky or UK or Berea then. Lincoln Memorial right across the border in northeast TN would probably work too. Or support local theatre if you're from around there.

My mom used to do the old-person's heart walk at LMU (Lincoln Memorial Univ). My dad owned WNTT in Tazewell, then sold it to the guy who dug the P-38 Lightning out of the glacier in Greenland.

Most UK students from Eastern Kentucky lose most of their accent fairly quickly, and I'm sure the theater department would probably rather die than put that accent on stage for anything other than a play about how Eastern Kentuckians are violent, ignorant hillbillies.

Some of the views in Lexington social circles can be pretty harsh. This past Thanksgiving the upper-class discussion turned to Kentucky literature and whether a prominent and famous local author was correct in thinking that what Eastern Kentucky needed was an infusion of outside genes to make the people there more intelligent, touching on rape gangs or mass sterilization. Then they looked at me and realized they were in mixed company.

 

[Squiggy]

Google: Tangier Island

 

[Avon]

a lot of american accents aren't that far from some of the more 'rural' english accents, so there could be something to this theory.

old old english is pretty similar to dutch.

so in conclusion, lets just all be thankful we don't speak french. unless you do in which case, my apologies :P

 

[gturner]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E[/yt]

Yep, that's pretty thick.

 

[Squiggy]

The accent, like most other American accents, are fading thanks to 60 years of television.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Yes, I know Classical Latin didn't sound Italian, but it sounded far more Italian than English.

For what I understand, Classical Latin should have sounded like a mix between Italian and German: lots of hard consonant, intermixed with long, open vowels.

I thought the voice actor for Augustus Caesar in Civilization 5 did a good job. Probably not a flawless one, but it still gives a good idea.

I thought Ulster Scots was generally reckoned to be the closest as a lot of them settled in what were to become the southern states.

Close. They helped form the Appalachian accent, but not all southern accents.

I thought that American English spelling was largely down to Noah Webster, although he might well have revived older variants.

This is true. He fought in the American Revolution and viewed it as his patriotic duty to say "fuck those British spellings."

The accent, like most other American accents, are fading thanks to 60 years of television.

You would think that, but it turns out that this isn't true. Certainly some are dying out. New England accents, for example, isn't being used by people being born today. But the New York accent is going strong. Recently, they discovered a Seattle accent, which wasn't thought to exist 30 years ago.

ETA: This is also relevant. We have a decent idea what Richard III's accent was, which was about 100 years before Elizabeth.

Link with audio file

Also might be interesting is this: Link

Essentially, it's an attempt to recreate how Shakespeare would have been pronounced at the time by taking Midsummer Night's Dream, which has a lot of words that are supposed to rhyme, but don't today.

 

[EmoBorg]

Some of the views in Lexington social circles can be pretty harsh. This past Thanksgiving the upper-class discussion turned to Kentucky literature and whether a prominent and famous local author was correct in thinking that what Eastern Kentucky needed was an infusion of outside genes to make the people there more intelligent, touching on rape gangs or mass sterilization. Then they looked at me and realized they were in mixed company.

What the author said was uncalled for.

 

[gturner]

Oh, it gets worse. The Author was Harry M. Caudill, who wrote "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" which inspired John F. Kennedy to spend millions in aid to Appalachia. He was also a UK professor, distinguished scholar, opposed strip mining, etc., one of the most famous advocates for the region.


Herald Leader story from 2012

...

Ultimately, although conditions in the mountains improved, the salvation Caudill wanted never materialized. The poor remained legion.


That embittered Caudill. He came to blame his neighbors for being hopeless, for having "weak genes." And that led him to draw up a sterilization scenario for Eastern Kentucky, working in secret with William Shockley, a notorious eugenicist of the era.

...
As Caudill told friends and strangers alike, with the fervor of the newly converted, dysgenics explained so much about Appalachia. Smart and ambitious people fled the mountains to pursue opportunity in cities. This "brain drain" left behind a stagnating population of dullards. Multiply that over several generations — especially as relatives intermarry and introduce chromosomal abnormalities — and you've ruined the gene pool just as surely as strip mining poisons the drinking water, he said.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/21/2451229/chapter-4-disillusioned-harry.html#storylink=cpy​

...

Back home, Caudill complained about "the trash element," his son Harry Frye Caudill said in a 1998 oral-history interview. The elder Caudill jauntily told reporters that the best federal anti-poverty program for Eastern Kentucky would be an Army base that could bring in outside sperm.

And on and on and on. There's lots of discusson in the article's comments.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/21/2451229/chapter-4-disillusioned-harry.html#storylink=cpy​

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/21/2451229/chapter-4-disillusioned-harry.html#storylink=cpy​

 

[Saga]

i live in Virginia very near LMU...trust me, sitting through inept school productions of Shakespeare is not a novelty.

 

[thestrangequark]

The accent, like most other American accents, are fading thanks to 60 years of television.

You would think that, but it turns out that this isn't true. Certainly some are dying out. New England accents, for example, isn't being used by people being born today. But the New York accent is going strong. Recently, they discovered a Seattle accent, which wasn't thought to exist 30 years ago.

As a born and raised Seattleite, I am curious... do you have any references? I always thought my accent in general was a fairly mild but standard American accent. Our vowels aren't as flat as the midwest, and I know I pronounce a bag, bagel, roof, and a few other words differently...but I wonder what the overal defining parameters of the accent would be. I recall an English poster here saying I sounded Irish, which I thought was odd.

Living in NYC one is exposed to a shit ton of different American accents. There are not only the city accents which are different for the different boroughs, and sometimes for different neighborhoods within the boroughs (there are at least two distinguishable Brooklyn accents), but the Jersey accent is pretty prevalent. One also hears accents from pretty much everywhere else in the country.

 

[Squiggy]

The accent, like most other American accents, are fading thanks to 60 years of television.

You would think that, but it turns out that this isn't true. Certainly some are dying out. New England accents, for example, isn't being used by people being born today. But the New York accent is going strong. Recently, they discovered a Seattle accent, which wasn't thought to exist 30 years ago.

Which is why I said "most" other accidents. There are some places where the local culture is so strong it drowns out the national media, which relies on a neutered midwestern or Southern California pronunciation of things (like BBC English in the UK).

It's becoming fairly evident in the south, especially compared to 30 years ago. These days, native Texans and Georigians are more likely to hail from large cities and their accents reflect growing up around many people. Several decades ago more southerners lived in more isolation and the only accents they hard (and therefore picked up) were the accents of their family members, who picked it up from their family members, and so forth. Hence the comparatively minor deviations from generation to generation.

Granted, there are still differences. People from Chicago sound like people from Chicago, Boston from Boston, and New York from New York. In cities like that, you have a high population of people who are actually from there. So like the children who learned their accent from their parents, you have neighbors picking up the accent of their neighbors and that just multiplies accents. However, "new Atlanta" is made up of people from all over and the accents tend to wash each other out. It's like DC. No one is really from DC, so there isn't a dominate DC accent like people from Baltimore (emphasis on the O vowel sound).

 

[Relayer1]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E[/yt]

Yep, that's pretty thick.

Interesting.

That sounds like it's somewhere between the 'Southern' USA accent and the 'Westcountry/Cornish' UK accents...

 

[cooleddie74]

You guys should hear the thick, syrupy and twangy accent that comes out of Southside Virginia in the general Martinsville-Danville area. It's often worlds apart from the common accents you hear emanating from just 40 or 50 miles away and there've been more than a few times I thought I'd need a translator just to understand what some diner or gas station owner in Franklin, Pittsylvania or Henry County was saying.

You ask where the closest restaurant or landmark is and there are times when it sounds like they're speaking Pig Latin with a drawl. It gets worse with some of the more elderly folks from that part of the state....you keep half-expecting language subtitles to appear right below their heads. There've been a few very funny moments over the years when local news broadcasts have actually had to insert subtitles when covering stories and people from that part of the state.

 

[Mary Ann]

Most (if not all) accents in England don't pronounce their R's.

Actually, in England's southwest (the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Wiltshire, the various Somerset ones, and the city of Bristol) not only do the dialects pronounce their R's, they often also add R's where none are needed. When I was working in primary schools in North Somerset and Devon I used to love seeing the wee ones teaching themselves to spell. Two of the most common spelling variations I witnessed were "sor" for "saw" and "warter" for "water", because that's what the children heard coming out of their own mouths when they sounded those words out.

Archaeologist Phil Harding, from Time Team fame, has a very thick Wiltshire accent:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61lfmiAMC84[/yt]

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

As much travelling as I've been doing lately, I haven't been exposed to many accents. I spent two days in Atlanta last year, for example, and I swear the only Southern accent I heard the whole time was at the airport.

 

[scotpens]

When I was working in primary schools in North Somerset and Devon I used to love seeing the wee ones teaching themselves to spell. Two of the most common spelling variations I witnessed were "sor" for "saw" and "warter" for "water", because that's what the children heard coming out of their own mouths when they sounded those words out.

Reminds me of that early Beatles recording of Meredith Willson's "Till There Was You," with Paul McCartney singing:

There were birds in the sky
But I never sore them winging
No, I never sore them a-tall
Till there was you.

Funny thing is, we don't usually associate that pronunciation with a scouse accent.

 

[ITL]

Macca's speaking and singing voices were quite different, though.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Which is why I said "most" other accidents.

I see what you did there.

 

[cooleddie74]

I remember a number of years ago a dialect expert saying that Virginia was one of the parts of the United States where certain words were pronounced along the lines of the way they were spoken in Canada. They raised the example that "about" in some corners of Virginia rolls off the tongue sounding like "a-boat" and when I thought about it they were correct. It might not be a large number of words that sounded like their English-language Canadian counterparts but there's a resemblance depending on where in this state you are at any given moment.