Finally – I found the source.
It was from a letter written to William Safire, and printed in his book On Language. The column was about the pronunciations of either and neither (eether and eyether). The British use the pronunciation “eyether”.
Here is the quote:
(sorry for the Pit like talk, but that’s what it takes to fight ignorance…)
Unless I see any evidence that prior to Victorian times either and schedule were pronounced the American way in Britain, I’m not going to be terribly convinced that they were influenced by German pronounciations.
I’m also going to have to disagree about German making no sense as compared to English. English is a very complex and irregular language. IIRC, there are vastly more words in English than any other language. In English, there is a tendency to simply invent a new word whenever one might be called for. German and other languages tend to use existing words to describe it (although German does shove them all into one word, it really can’t be considered a new word).
Amusingly, “rechtschreibreform” seems to translate into English literally as “right write reform”, which sounds really silly.
William Safire is occasionally wrong in his language column, but in any case this isn’t even Safire himself writing. Not only are the people who write letters to him frequently wrong, they aren’t even remotely consistent among themselves. Take the things written in Safire’s columns with a large grain of salt. If there seems to be general agreement between Safire and the people who write to him on a particular etymology, there’s a reasonably good chance that it’s correct (although even then he’s sometimes wrong). If there’s a large amount of disagreement, use some other source to determine the etymology.
slight hijack…
In the days before radio and broadcasting, how could one man have such a broad influence on the speech patterns of an entire nation? I mean would that even be possible? The closest thing I have heard to that is the old legend about Castillian Spaniards pronouncing the c and z in imitation of a certain king’s lisp.
Much of it sounds like a very broad (West) Midlands accent to me. Most of the suggestions on this site remind me of the way my father and brother-in-law speak (or rather spoke in the case of my father), and indeed so can I when I go back to visit !
http://www.renfaire.com/Language/pronunciation.html
I found the same in the section from Bill Bryson’s book on the English Language - it was easy enough to for me to guess the pronunciation of most words, so long as I imagined my b-i-l speaking them!
“EE-ther” versus “EYE-ther”
aka. "iD@® vs. "aID@®
According to the OED, “EYE-ther” is used a bit more in London than “EE-ther” in educated speech, although it’s “not in accordance with the analogies of standard English.”
Anyhow, it seems the EYE-ther pronounciation goes back to at least 1701, and has been specifically noted as “common” in 1791. Considering that Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, I believe we can dismiss that story.
Sorry, the Jones in the quote above should have 1701 after it…that’s where I got that year. And the smiley should be an “e” followed by a colon.
I am from England, Und we spreche nein like ze Deutchlanders.