I read somewhere recently (and I just can’t remember where) that a lot of British pronounciations of English words actually are not originally English, but rather German. They were brought into British use by Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. A number of these pronounciations us Americans might be likely to believe are the more correct ones (or at least more original, due to their Britishness). Is this true? Did he have such an impact on the English language?
I don’t think so. Albert was not universally popular in England.
You may have seen this site already. It’s not quite on topic but it does discuss the German language as it affects American use of English.
Any examples? I don’t find British pronunciations to be terribly German at all. I’m just unclear exactly what you mean. As in versus American English?
When Germans speak English, they often sound British, since that’s usually the system of pronunciation they learn. Could that be what you mean?
From the Wodehouse novel Psmith In The City, published in 1910, I can infer that Germany was looked upon as a threatening rival to Britain even then, so I’d be very surprised if German pronunciations became fashionable in England. Posting the Amazon link would be superfluous here since it wouldn’t substantiate my statement; suffice to say that in the novel an election for Parliament takes place, during which it comes out that one of the candidates was educated in Germany. Branded as a “German Spy”, he loses the contest.
I think you’re thinking of one or another of the Georges, not so much Prince Albert. Apparently “Thames” was pronounced the way it looks until the Germanic George couldn’t say it that way, and we’ve been saying Tems ever since.
Victoria was a real Germanophile, though, and until the end of the 19th century, England liked Germany a lot, though maybe not so much Wilhelm I, and they tried to like Wilhelm II, but that didn’t go so well…
Genie, that’s a nice story, but the Oxford English Dictionary shows that King Alfred spelled it (and presumably pronounced it) “Temes” waaaay back in 893. The OED also quotes a Parliamentary roll from 1503 as describing “a River called the Thamyse, otherwise called the Temmesse.” So I don’t think you can blame the Georges for that one.
And I think it’s unlikely that the King also influenced the pronunciation of the village of Thame in Oxfordshire, which is also pronounced “tame”. For that matter it is highly unlikely that the speech of the Royal Family, German or otherwise, had a significant impact on demotic English (though it might conceivably have influenced the speech of a few courtiers). After all, who sounds like the Queen nowadays?
As for anti-German feeling pre-WWI, see also The Riddle of the Sands and much of John Buchan.
Oh well. I’ve been suckered.
Well, there is the common British/German pronunciation of Aluminum (Ah-loo-min-ee-um, but I can’t think of any other off-hand. Having taught English for years in Germany and having met hundreds of British English teachers, not one ever mentioned the fact that Germans pronounced words like back in the Limey hood.
This following tidbit has no real relevance to the subject, but I once had a German student who spoke German with the typical, heavy-duty Berlin dialect, but when he spoke English, he had a flawless FRENCH accent. Strangest thing I had ever heard…then I found out his new French girlfriend spoke no German and she taught him English. When he first said, “I vant to go to zee cinemah” it was all I could do not to loose lunch through my nose.
Somewhat, but not completely, back to the subject, I think it is more likely that Germans are pronounce things with a British accent…all computer terms are in English, a lot of consumer products have English names and Deutsch/English (Denglish) is heard more and more. Nobody buys a Flugschein, everyone gets a “ticket”…the list goes on and on.
That may be because the British spelling is ‘aluminium’ …
I’m still trying to find the source. I think it might have been in my almanac, but I can’t find the quote. If I remember correctly it included such pronunciations as the word “schedule”. Here’s one thing I did find on the web though:
The dialect of English that may have had some of Albert’s influence was Received Pronunciation (RP). This is a dialect of the upper classes (especially those who’ve gone to Oxford and Cambridge) and so was the prestige dialect in England. As a prestige dialect, it had a certain amount of influence on the other English dialects, so perhaps there’s a bit of truth to the OP.
From my understanding, RP was more of a copying of Victoria’s speech rather than Albert’s and even then, it wasn’t an accurate copy of her idiolect.
Having noticed, that in the eighteenth Century, all Nouns in English, were capitalized; and that the Germans, do likewise capitalize all their Nouns; and that this Period of History, was the selfsame in which the three German Georges did come to the Throne of Britain; I put Two and Two and Two together…, could said Capitalization have been a German Influence upon English?
And don’t even get me started, upon Punctuation.
Various items:
-
England and Germany shares common roots (if you go far enough back into European history you find common roots for just about everything). After all, and since before Christ, they were Anglo Saxons, Saxony being a part of Germany. According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle “The first
inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia.” The last bit is surprising, but it turned out as a mistake by a (Saxon) compiler, who confused Celtic Armorica (in today’s Brittany, which is in France - are we having fun yet?) with Armenia. Due to the common roots, it is fairly easy for a German to learn English, the reverse is not true. Germans succeeded in complicating everything, including their own language, the recent “Rechtschreibreform” (reformed orthography) ended in a disaster. -
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, when English is taught in Germany (usually their first choice of a 2nd language) it is taught with a British pronunciation. I grew up in Germany with a lot of American influence, and I was quite fluent in English, before I started to learn it “officially,” but I had problems at school because of my pronunciation, my choice of words and orthography. To the American ear, there might be echoes of British in a German fresh off the boat, and if you were exposed to enough Germans, you might find similarities in pronunciation in a British person fresh off the Concorde (if it ever gets off the ground again), but it isn’t British English being influenced by the Teutons, it’s the other way round.
-
The influence of today’s German on English is next to nil. English pervades Germany (as it does Europe) and you’ll see English headlines end expressions all over the place. The same cannot be said for German at all. There were some attempts by Audi (“Vorsprung durch Technik”) and by Volkswagen of America (“Fahrvergnügen”) but it remained an oddity and no-one really knew what it meant.
-
If you really want to study an interesting phenomenon, then you must follow the spread of commonly used tools and their impact on the language. In many European countries, a screwdriver is known by the German woord “Schraubenzieher,” simply because it was introduced by German merchants and artisans. Today, the commonly used tool is a computer, and in the German language, “RAM” is better understood than “Hauptspeicher”, a “floppy” is a “Floppy”, a “CD-ROM” is a “CD-ROM” and if you start your machine it does “boot.”
To me, reading German documentation of a computer is an ordeal, because I constantly need to reverse-translate and say “ah, that’s what they mean.”
American English is more influenced by German than British English is. Remember, there are more Americans of German ancestry than of any other ethnic group. (For the past century or so, on the question on the U.S. census which asks for your ancestry, the top three answers have been
- German
- Irish
- English.)
Christmas trees originated in Germany and may indeed have been spread to the U.K. by Prince Albert, but at the same time (or even a little earlier) they were being introduced into the U.S. by German immigrants.
curwin writes:
> A number of these pronounciations us Americans might be
> likely to believe are the more correct ones (or at least
> more original, due to their Britishness).
I think you have fallen prey to a common misunderstanding, the notion that for any language difference between British and American English, the American version must be more recent and the British version must be an older survival. This isn’t generally the case. Three or four hundred years ago the ancestors of British and American (and Canadian and Irish and Australian and New Zealand) residents were all speaking a variety of English that sounded quite different from any present variety of English. In the past three or four centuries, the English spoken in each of those countries has evolved, often in different ways in each country but sometimes in the same way in all those countries. There’s no necessary reason to think that the current British (or American or Canadian or Irish or Australian or New Zealand) pronounciation or word is any closer to the older version of English. For instance, we have been able to approximately figure out Shakespeare’s pronounciation of English. It doesn’t sound like RP or any current British dialect. In so far as it resembles anything modern, it sounds vaguely Irish, although that is only a very vague approximation to it.
RP is, I believe, a relatively modern phenomenon. It is not the standard speech of the upper classes but of the middle classes. Your doctor, lawyer or accountant is more than likely to speak some form of RP – with or without minor regional variants – but the Queen, Prince Charles and the Duke of Devonshire (and Brian Sewell) have a markedly different mode of pronunciation (for example, the vowel sound in “house” is pronounced somewhere between the RP version and the “i” sound in “mice”). Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge Universities are not significantly more or less likely to speak with RP than graduates of any other university: I know many Oxford and Cambridge graduates who have retained their distinctive regional accents and many speakers of RP who went to other universities or did not go to university at all. (Incidentally, a few years ago a sound recording of the Victorian Prime Minister Gladstone was discovered. Despite being the son of a well-to-do family, educated at Eton and Oxford, he spoke with a distinctive Northern accent.)
It is unlikely that Albert’s accent had any impact on RP for several reasons: as well as the ones given above, there was very little sound recording available at the time and certainly no mass-media so very few people will have had any idea what he sounded like.
So were the last two words a deliberate bad pun?
And Boston Irish, at that.
lawott: Neither deliberate nor pun. I din’t say it jackboots. It boots. The connection with kick starting the thing has beeen lost in translation.
Jeez, now I get it: “Das Boot” - movie about a Germany computer in WWII which would have changed the outcome of the war had the hero not injected “eine Insekte” (a bug) using 5 channel paper tape …