The film Eye of the Beholder… Ewan MacGregor is a Brit voyeur who has been trailing Ashley Judd all over creation. Near the end of the movie they finally meet face to face for the first time. She’s a waitress in a diner.
He orders the “omelet with herbs.”
She gives him a blank look and says, “Huh?”
He says “'Erbs.”
“Oh, okay.”
I’m American myself and never understood why Americans are supposed to omit the /h/ in herb. I’ve always used the spelling pronunciation myself. Once I said “herbs” and my sister reacted negatively, since according to her, Martha Stewart pretentiously aspirates the /h/ in herbs. I said, “Who’s Martha Stewart?” I didn’t mean to be pretentious, I just didn’t understand why we were supposed to lose a perfectly good /h/.
The reason for dropping it, of course, is the same as the reason from dropping it from honest, honor, hour: English obtained these words from French. The /h/ had been silent in French since even before there was French; it had been lost from Vulgar Latin by 1 AD.
Now, why only these words lost the /h/ sound in English while we retained it in many others from French is a mystery. I bet that Middle English picked up all these French words with no /h/, but the spelling pronunciation was restored by all those Latin scholars in the Renaissance. Somehow a few words never got the /h/ restored. As for homage, I was brought up saying the /h/-less pronunciation, but as an adult realized that some people say it with the /h/, so now I do too. As an American, I have a natural preference for spelling pronunciations over “Throatwarbler Mangrove” English. (SDMB bylaw #1360945: you cannot have a thread about British pronunciation without invoking “Throatwarbler Mangrove.” :))
There’s been a secondary loss of /h/ before the long /ju:/ vowel in New Jersey dialect: for human, humid, humor they say “yooman,” “yoomit,” “yoomor.”
The American accent supposedly (if I get my facts right - I don’t have a copy of Mario Pei’s The Story of the English Language on me right now, so I could be off) was a variant of southern English accents - mostly in the London area, where the biggest part of our British colonists came from. That may answer something.
But the British seem to be more eloquent than the Americans. I’m the only American I know who uses one as a third-person pronoun - in America, one would normally substitute you. A teacher of mine was talking about how unusual he thought it was that an English friend of his was using that construction. Of course, we Americans use the subjunctive more than the fellows in Anglia, so I guess it balances out…
“Beer” is the word I always think of whenever I hear the term “American accent”. Being an Aussie, I do the “beeah” thing, but I really love that pumped up final R on steroids that the 'merkins give it.
Beer-r-r-rrrr-rrr.
The Aussies would also say:
HAH-v’d Uni-VER-sity.
The first R is kinda done away with, the second syllable has a definite schwa thing happening, but “university” keeps its R. Is this close to the Bostonian thing?
Well, if you’re American it’s difficult to get a sense of how your own accent sounds to other people, but one way is to watch foreign television or films where an American character is played by a non-American. If the actors aren’t very good at mimicry, it’s very illuminating.
Also interesting are when non-American English speakers are intentionally making fun of American English speakers. They tend to exaggerate their own stereotypes of what Americans sound like, and you can get a sense of how you sound to them from that.
Even better along these lines is a non-English speaker imitating spoken English when they don’t speak it at all. But that won’t help you with, say, American vs. British.
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