American accent closer to "original" british accent?

[slipster]

IIRC, it was said of King George II, a member of the House of Hanover, that he sounded like a foreigner whether he spoke German or English.

[NDP]

Obviously I am quite new in the linguistics game. Of course, my German friend jokingly claims that English is really a variant of German, as all other languages are.

Your German friend is not entirely facetious. English is a branch of the Germanic linguistic family tree as this chart shows.

[Gyrate]

*Originally posted by APB *
Actually, raygirvan’s point was a good one, in that certain Americans (particularly, it must be said, past generations of American Shakespeare scholars) did have an inferiority complex about the culture of the Old World. Asserting that American English was ‘closer’ to Elizabethan English was one way of suggesting that American claims to that cultural heritage were at least as valid as those of the English. As Gurr rather subtlely implies, interpretations of such matters can be twisted by one’s own cultural biases.

I only bring it up when some smug Brit complains about Americans mangling the English language. If English has changed less in the US than in the UK over the intervening 300 years, we can hardly be guilty of “mangling” the language, “innit”?

[Cazzle]

I recall seeing a show on TV a couple of years back that claimed the New Zealand accent was closest to earlier English accents, determined using recordings made in the 50’s of people born in the previous century. If I could remember more about it I’d Google it, but it was just one of those things that I saw, thought “How 'bout that!” and moved on. Any Kiwis around here recall it? I would think it would be more newsworthy there than anywhere else.

If this is all true, why don’t Australians and New Zealanders sound more like Americans than the English?

[raygirvan]

cazzle
Why don’t Australians and New Zealanders sound more like Americans than the English?

Different regional make-up. Transportation targeted the urban poor, especially of London, and it’s the standard explanation that the Australian accent derives from Cockney and similar London accents, with some Irish input.

[Wendell_Wagner]

It’s not really true that American English is less changed from the English of Shakespeare’s time than British English is. They’ve both changed a lot over the past 400 years. It would take a detailed, complete inventory of the two dialects to discover which is closer to the English spoken 400 years ago, and I suspect that it would show that there’s not much difference in the amount of change. In any case, the point is that there’s no such thing as archaic dialects. Language is always changing, and it always changes at about the same rate in any dialect.

[Cazzle]

Different regional make-up. Transportation targeted the urban poor, especially of London, and it’s the standard explanation that the Australian accent derives from Cockney and similar London accents, with some Irish input.

Cor blimey! Who’da thunk? Thanks, raygirvan.

[raygirvan]

That same site, What’s Your English?, is a pretty good study of where various dialects of English, including US, came from. Among other things, it makes the necessary distinction between the different backgrounds of US dialects (“General American”, New England, New York and The South) concluding that minority dialects are closest to English, but that the strongly rhotic General American owes much of its nature to post-1790 Irish immigration.

[aaaaaarrgg]

*Originally posted by InTransit *
**Of course, my German friend jokingly claims that English is really a variant of German, as all other languages are. **

geeve me eny word and i show you eets grrrrrreek rooot!

[Exapno_Mapcase]

In her account of the Constitutional Convention, Miracle at Philadelphia, Catherine Drinker Bowen has chapters on how contemporary America was seen in the eyes of travelers. Some quotes:

In Boston… everything reminded travelers of London: the brick and wooden houses, the customs, even the speech and accent…Benjamin Franklin …remarked that ‘the Boston manner, turn of phrase and even tone of voice and accent in pronunciation, all please, and seem to revive and refresh me.’

Nicholas Cresswell, during his travels, writes that the New Englanders ‘have a sort of whining cadence which I cannot describe.’ On this peculiarity all agreed, although, like Cresswell, none could spell it out. If Roger Sherman of Connecticut spoke of his neighbor’s daughter he pronounced it datter, if he spoke of cranberry sauce, he called it sass; with his neighbors he extolled the laws of God and natur.

New Englanders said dew for do, tew for too. Noah Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language (1789) notes the keow of New England but defends it as no worse than the London skey for sky and kaynd for kind.

Most Americans used the current eighteenth-century pronunciations of sarve for serve, desarve for deserve, and said consate for conceit, desate for deceit. They also said obleege, and deef for deaf. They seem to have flattened the final a in America…

Robert Carter, the Virginia planter, had advertised for a tutor ‘educated in good schools upon the Continent’ (meaning the American continent), rather than an Englishman or Scotchman - not because of any superiority in scholarship or character but because Carter preferred the native accent.

[John_Mace]

River:

Thanks for the correction. After reading your post I realized my mistake: the first episode of “The Story of English” was called “The Mother Tongue”. The PBS series is good because you can hear the various accents as opposed to trying to tease them out of text. There’s some good audio of the Tangiers (sp?) Island folk.