Not that it will further the discussion, but here’s a funny story:
One time my friend Joe and I were walking through a museum in London. We were discussing the various exhibits as a family of three walked by. After they passed, the little boy asked the mother, “What language ah they speaking, mummy?”
“English, deah,” was her reply.
To which the father quipped, “Not vurry wull.”
Sorry if I misspelled any of the words. I’m not very good with foreign languages. 
A fascinating thread!
I expect to be corrected on this, but as far as I’m aware, no other language has changed as much since, say, the 9th-10th centuries as has English.
I did four years of Latin, French and German at school, and impressed myself by being able to translate the Strasburg Oaths (842 AD) written in all three languages.
Old French and German have evolved far less than OE over the last thousand years.
I grew up in Hull-a Yorkshire seaport with its own very distinct, but otherwise easily comprehensible, accent. Travel thirty miles North into the farming countryside of East Yorkshire and the dialect is several hundred years old and pretty well incomprehensible -in fact the BBC made recordings before it died out-which I suspect it probably has. Unlike the Swiss dialects they didn’t even have the excuse of living in an isolated valley-it was a two hour bike ride from Hull.
For example the Great Vowel Shift, and the ensuing diphthongs, is to them unknowe.
“When I were a lad we used to joomp in’t beck in’t noody” (When I was a boy we used to jump into the stream naked)
As far as the Scandinavians are concerned, they enjoy taking the mickey out of each other on all sorts of subjects-remember how a Norwegian cinema advertised a Monty Python film? “This film is so funny it’s been banned in Sweden!”
Finally, The two main “dialects” of German could be considered as two separate languages-High Germans often have trouble understanding Low German-a dialect which is very similar indeed to Dutch.
German and Dutch would be more properly classified as a dialect continuum rather than two separate languages. The various dialects blend into each other rather than being simply two distinct languages, which is what you’d find if you focused only on the standard forms. You find this sort of thing all over the place.
The same thing is true with respect to the great Romance language dialect continuum that goes Portuguese<->Spanish<->Catalan<->French<->Italian<->Sicilian. The point at which the language changes from heavily Italian-influenced French to heavily French-influenced Italian is not well defined, but presumably is somewhere near the border. Likewise, French speakers near the Spanish border sound more Spanish-y than Parisians or French speakers near the Italian border. Many of the transitional dialects have been dying in recent decades due to centralization of education, but they still exist.
Don’t forget - as most English and almost all other English speakers do- that the “y” in “ye old English tea shoppe” is in fact a Scandinavian rune signifying ‘th’.
And for god’s sake don’t around saying “shoppy”! It’s Shop- It’s just the way they spelt it then.
No. If it was spelled “shoppe”, it’s because at one time there was a vowel sound at the end in whatever English dialect was being transcribed. Probably not “ee” sound, but could have been an “uh” or schwa e sound.
English doesn’t have it’s weird spelling system because people were sloppy. It’s just that we (mostly) froze or spelling before the modern pronunciations evolved.
When I went to embassy school, with mostly British & American children, but many Canadian kids, and kids from English speaking African countries, as well as a number of kids from European countries who spoke remarkably good English, because their education systems taught it from first grade on, and it was commonly spoken by almost everyone (ie, Scandinavian counties), all the American kids were cowed into dropping “what” for “pardon” because of the looks we got from all the adults. The British adults thought “What?” sounded awful, and the American adults thought we made all Americans sound awful. I spent just a year there, but it was probably two years back in the states before I could say “What?” again.
The language of Beowulf* is *a separate language. Old English is called that because that is it’s name. It’s kind of like how no one confuses New York with York in England just because “New York” has “York” in the name. Or, no one confuses Washington State with Washington, DC. They share a word in their names because they are named for the same person. Old English was the language of the region called “England.”
The language of Chaucer (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote \ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, \ And bathed every veyne in swich licour \ Of which vertu engendred is the flour…) is called “Middle English,” and the language of Shakespeare is called “early Modern English.”
Various things happened that precipitated changes: the Norman conquest caused a big change that pushed Old English into Middle English, although, ME lasted for a long time, and there were different periods within it.
Queen Elizabeth introduced English into the court, and that had a big influence on how English was regarded, and who spoke it, which influenced how it was spoken.
“Shoppe” is probably leftover from a time when English had declensions (besides the possessive and plural, which are so nearly universal, that languages which have only those are not considered declined languages). Even when cases had pretty much disappeared from English, they still remained in some dialects, so there were dialects of what would nonetheless have been considered Middle English, that used dative and accusative cases. Actually, Modern English still has accusative pronouns.
New topic: when I was in the Army, I had two guys in one of my training units who were Jamaican. When they talked to anyone else, we could understand them with no problem, although they had an identifiably Jamaican accent. When they talked to just each other, no one else could understand them.
I disagree.* Before the age of the dictionary makers, people were sloppy about spelling. If you look at writing from the 17th century or before (especially handwritten as opposed to printed material) you can often find people spelling the same word in different ways within the same passage. No-one thought you were illiterate because you used variant spellings, because there was no accepted authority regarding correctness.
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*Well, you may be right about the particular case of “shop-uh”, I don’t know.
The 1970s Jamaican cult classic “The Harder They Come” was filmed in English (the Jamaican patois variety), but it had yellow subtitles when released in America, because they figured the patois would be too difficult for Americans to understand.
Oddly enough, while most of the reggae & ska I’ve heard from the 1960s and 1970s is in pretty much standard English, which makes it quite easy to follow the lyrics, that’s not at all true of more recent Caribbean dancehall stuff- when I tune into the Caribbean station in Boston and listen to recent greatest hits stuff, it’s in heavy patois and very difficult to follow the lyrics.
But they were spelling phonetically, not just adding random letters in because they looked cool. If there is no standard lexicography, then there is no reason to spell the same word the same all the time as long that werd is obviously the wurd you mean. And the point being we don’t have our weird spelling system because people were sloppy or simply spelling words differently all the time. We pronounce words differently than they were pronounced when the spelling was (mostly) fixed.
We don’t know that people didn’t pronounce words differently in different contexts. English was once an inflected language, and didn’t abruptly stop being so. It could be that people pronounced a word differently depending on whether it was the subject or object of a sentence. I mean, we pronounce “record” differently depending on whether it is a noun or a verb, and new words often evolve from connotations of what was originally a single word.
If someone in 1700 spells “nice” that way on a page, and later spells it “nise” on the same page, it is possible he didn’t mean exactly the same thing each time, because that word underwent a really significant evolution in meaning over a few hundred years.
It’s like someone writing “I’m glad the weather is cool today, because I want to wear the kewl hoodie I got at Comic Con.” Yes, “kewl” would be marked wrong by an English teacher, but everybody knows what it means, and it would be a different kind of wrong to describe the temperature as “kewl.”
No. It’s the other way round. Life of Brian was actually banned in Norway for blasphemy, and this was used in advertising in Sweden. (It was only shown in theater months later, rated 18 and with extra information at the start explaining how Brian is definitely not Jesus. And the subtitles were removed for part of the dialog.
There’s an interesting master’s thesis for someone: how much difference in vocabulary is there between UK and US English, as opposed to regional differences within each country? My husband, for example, knows what lifts, lorries and bin liners are from watching Dr. Who and Monty Python, but when we moved to NYC, where he had never lived before, he occasionally encountered words he’d never heard before.
I don’t know what the UK term for a carbonated soft drink, like Coke, is, but around here, you might hear “soda,” “pop,” “soft drink,” “seltzer,” (although people who say this are dying out), “Coke” as a generic term (“What kind of Coke do you have?” “Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, Diet Pepsi”), and for trash cans, you might hear “waste can,” “waste basket,” “garbage can,” and a few more.
If you are going to call British English and American English two different languages, then you might have to call the English of East Texas and the English of Brooklyn two different languages.
The only time I couldn’t understand someone who was English, it was in Limehouse, and he was drunk and missing most of his teeth.
Now, it’s true that people do “code-switching,” so that they attempt to make themselves understood, and aside from the missing teeth, the guy in Limehouse may have been too drunk to pick up on me “not being from around there,” and make fine adjustments in his pronunciation and word choices, but I think just plain old drunk had more to do with it than anything.
I encountered a similar situation with the Philippines. There are a number of different languages there, which both the government and the general populace refer to as dialects*. It’s more a political issue than a linguistic issue, IMHO. China is pretty hepped up on considering everyone in the country as Chinese so referring to whatever language being used in whatever area of the country as a Chinese dialect fits in with that calculus.
*Funny thing is while I was dating a lass from the Philippines, it was amusing to me when a native Tagalog-speaker referred to said lass’s native language (Spanish, as it turns out) as “an interesting dialect of Tagalog”. I learned some interesting curse words in both languages that evening.
In my experience, people trained in linguistics tend to say Hindi and Urdu are variant forms of one language, but every native Hindi or Urdu speaker I’ve ever met is insistent they’re entirely different, though related, languages.
They do differ in vocabulary as well as writing system: Hindi takes a lot of its vocabulary from Sanskrit, whereas Urdu draws on Persian. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make them separate languages- even in English, you have a lot of instances where you could choose to use a Germanic word or a synonymous French/Latin derived word to express the same idea.
The classic New England dialectal word for carbonated soft drinks is ‘tonic’, though I think you only really hear this nowadays from older, working-class or rural New Englanders: it’s definitely dying out.
The simple answer is of course that it’s entirely possible to read a page of text and have no clue whether the writer speaks/writes American or British English.
It always annoys me when people talk about “Flemish” and don’t seem to grok that in Belgium they also speak Dutch. Yes, the language is frequently butchered south of the border, but the difference between standard Dutch Dutch and standard Belgian Dutch is smaller than between the regional varieties within each country.
When I was in Cape Town I tried to speak some Dutch to Afrikaans speakers. I was able to understand them reasonably well, but it seemed they had a much harder time understanding me. (Afrikaans descends from Dutch but has super simple grammar.)
I’m sure a few linguists earned their PhDs arguing for or against the case that Dutch and German are dialects of the same language. They’re certainly close, but there are still important and non-obvious differences in grammar and enough differences in vocabulary to keep non-trivial sentences from being mutually intelligible.
German: darf ich im Meer schwimmen?
Dutch: mag ik in zee zwemmen?
English: can I / may I swim in the sea?
Someone who speaks Dutch but not German may think the German is saying “durf ik in het meer te zwemmen?” = “do I dare swim in the lake?”
People are “code switching” when doing that, like if you were hired to read the nightly news of course you are going to do it “proper”. Now go talk to a random person on the street.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but whenever I was in the Philippines some years ago, I’d watch a local news channel and the news reporting was in Pilipino, then the banter between the 'casters would be in Tagalog. And, yes, they are different. I always thought that was a good example of code switching.