Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

Posted Jul 29, 2022 11:16 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind by gevaerts
Parent article: Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

Bear in mind that English As She Is Spoke is a whole bunch of dialects, derived from similar languages that have morphed together, and then metamorphosed by nicking huge swathes of other languages.

So Scots, which is a DIFFERENT LANGUAGE to English, has different words, different pronouncation, different grammar, but being derived from Old Anglish (as opposed to English, derived from Saxon), comes from very similar roots and is mutually comprehensible (mostly). Just like Scouse or Geordie.

And then we have the Queens English, or Received Pronounciation, or BBC English, or whatever the snobs like to call it which - despite being the newest dialect - is taken to be gospel.

And the long a - as in "farther" - is very much a new, Queens English pronounciation acquired during the Frenchification of Modern English. My family still laugh sometimes at my flat a's in words like castle, or bath, despite the flat a being ye olde traditionally correct pronounciation EVERYWHERE.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for standards - and when I go up north the dialect sometimes is incomprehensible, but don't you dare tell me it's wrong - it's been around a lot longer than modern "correct" English.

Cheers,
Wol

Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

Posted Jul 30, 2022 21:17 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The long a thing wasn't acquired during Frenchification -- it was part of the dialect common in particular parts of the south-east much much *later* than Frenchification (like, 600 years later). The dialect differences in the UK before the advent of mass travel -- and to a considerable degree afterwards -- are quite remarkable. I can easily tell whether people were brought up in Hertfordshire like me purely from their accent, and can even often tell when people were brought up in the same *city*. Go all the way across Hertfordshire from where I was born and the accent is quite different to my ear -- and Hertfordshire is a small and homogenous county. Somewhere big and chaotic like Yorkshire or God forbid London has dozens of sub-regional accents, easily distinguishable even by non-natives (though London, being a melting pot, has such a chaos of accents that you probably need to be a professional to figure out what the hell is going on: it's not simply based on geographic divisions like Yorkshire more or less is).

Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

Posted Jul 30, 2022 21:55 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> The long a thing wasn't acquired during Frenchification -- it was part of the dialect common in particular parts of the south-east much much *later* than Frenchification (like, 600 years later).

600 years? "Modern English" is only 600 years old ... are you thinking of Normanisation?

I'm thinking of Frenchification - probably during the (late?) Georgian period - when it was fashionable for the nobility to speak French and write their English with French spellings ...

Cheers,
Wol

Nethercote: Twenty years of Valgrind

Posted Jul 30, 2022 21:23 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> And then we have the Queens English, or Received Pronounciation, or BBC English, or whatever the snobs like to call it which - despite being the newest dialect - is taken to be gospel.

RP is not by any means the newest dialect! It's old and has been wearing fuzzy slippers for quite some time now (and is little spoken any more: the accent spoken by, say, your average Cambridge grad is definitely not RP, and you basically never hear it even on the BBC any more unless you're listening to old recordings). Listen to what the kids are speaking in London now: forget the grammar and even vocabulary, even the phonetics are different. To me as a speaker of something quite like the Cambridge accent who grew up surrounded by the levelled accents of the 1980s south-east, it's amazing. Some people speaking Multicultural London English sound almost like they're singing to my ear :) my niece can code-switch in and out of that effortlessly: one dialect speaking to her friends, something quite different speaking to boring old adults like us.