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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132320
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| Posted: 18 September 2014 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | 1
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I'd suggest that pronunciation is closer to "grahsss" than "grarse."Elsewhere. . . "On the other hand, for example, the Midlands (where I am from) tends to drop consonants so 'house' becomes 'ouse'." I, too, hail from the Midlands -- West Bromwich -- and have amused and confounded my American friends with some of the pronunciations I remember from my childhood there. A favorite came from a visit my family took back to England in 1965. "Prop-lagged", I was sitting in the front room of my Grandparents house when my Gran'dad came in to uncover the canary. Not knowing I was there, he greeted the little yellow bird with (phonetically, as near as I can manage) "Ee's grond bit ol' mon, incha?" Translated, that would be "He's a grand bit of old man, isn't you?" In the years since I left England -- last time I was back was 1988 -- the accents have thickened considerably (as they have in Canada), and now, watching British movies, I sometimes have trouble understanding what people are saying. LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS was a real challenge, as it even used Cockney rhyming slang, and the source of the rhymes had changed!
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Adam Benford
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 June 2012
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 15
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| Posted: 18 September 2014 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | 2
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It's astonishing that regional accents survive at all really. We all learn to talk from our parents but the accent is also driven by those around us as we grow up. I'd guess a Yorkshireman in Shakespeare's day would almost have had a different dialect to a Londoner because no one really travelled. Now, on the other hand, with the advent of television (and international T.V. at that) you'd think the accents of the English speaking nations would merge, never mind the regions.
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Brian O'Neill
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 13 November 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 1964
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 8:57am | IP Logged | 3
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Someone must have 'rewritten' the unwritten rule for Cockney slang over the years. I can understand it in the 'original' three-word('A and B') form, but when it's reduced to one word..and it's the non-rhyming one..forget it!
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132320
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 9:36am | IP Logged | 4
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It's astonishing that regional accents survive at all really. We all learn to talk from our parents but the accent is also driven by those around us as we grow up. I'd guess a Yorkshireman in Shakespeare's day would almost have had a different dialect to a Londoner because no one really travelled. Now, on the other hand, with the advent of television (and international T.V. at that) you'd think the accents of the English speaking nations would merge, never mind the regions.••• I've noticed the "lower class" accent seems to have come to greater prominence since my day. Even educated people saying "me" for "my" for instance.
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Peter Martin
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 15811
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 9:36am | IP Logged | 5
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You must be having a bubble, intcha?
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Michael Penn
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 12 April 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 12447
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 9:43am | IP Logged | 6
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What did Stratfordian English sound like in Shakespeare's time?
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Peter Martin
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 15811
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 9:57am | IP Logged | 7
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I would say the London and Home Counties accents seem to have spread outward over the last few decades (including so-called 'Estuary English', as well as the unfortunate 'Mockney' phenomenon).
For example, poet Pam Ayres, who always seemed to be on TV when I was growing up, has a very strong accent. I used to assume she was from the West Country, but she is from Berkshire and her accent was reportedly once typical of rural Berkshire (less than a 90-minute drive from Heathrow airport). Nowadays I would expect people from Berkshire/Oxfordshire to have similarish accents to me (I was born and grew up not far from Bournemouth, in the middle of the south coast).
Of course, there remains a very wide range of accents, and even dialects, in England.
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Adam Benford
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 June 2012
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 15
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 10:08am | IP Logged | 8
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This is interesting, and demonstrates the speed of change:
http://www.economist.com/node/18775029
Perhaps such things are less noticeable in countries with a bigger geographical spread like the US (due to more defined boundaries) but that's just a guess.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 19 September 2014 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | 9
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What did Stratfordian English sound like in Shakespeare's time?••• At the risk of unleashing a chorus of groans from some quarters, I'll mention that his thick Warwickshire accent is one of the arguments against the Stratford man being Shakespeare.
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Ted Pugliese
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 05 December 2005
Location: United States
Posts: 7979
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| Posted: 20 September 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | 10
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I look forward to learning more about this. Thanks
again, John!
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Carmen Bernardo
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 08 August 2006
Location: United States
Posts: 3666
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| Posted: 21 September 2014 at 4:41am | IP Logged | 11
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This raises the question about how our language could end up changing so much that it becomes a whole different tongue. I've often heard and read about "losing the language". Perhaps it is a natural progression, as each generation moves further away from those which spoke what they called "proper" English.
Who knows? May a couple thousand years from now, the people living in what is the English-speaking world today will be saying things so far removed from what we may recognize that it really is a foreign language to us. Thoughts come to mind about the old Germanic languages and how these evolved into English, Dutch, German, and so forth. Furthermore, how the vernacular Latin developed into what is now Spanish, Portugese and French.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 21 September 2014 at 5:09am | IP Logged | 12
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Who knows? May a couple thousand years from now, the people living in what is the English-speaking world today will be saying things so far removed from what we may recognize that it really is a foreign language to us. Thoughts come to mind about the old Germanic languages and how these evolved into English, Dutch, German, and so forth. Furthermore, how the vernacular Latin developed into what is now Spanish, Portugese and French.•• I think it is the very soul of optimism to assume there will even BE a human civilization in "a couple thousand years," but it, somehow, there is, we can be sure the English language will have mutated a lot. Perhaps to the point of being unrecognizable to us.
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