Historical Accents

You are now aware that part of England used the gutteral R until recently and a few people still do in the back country.

youtube.com/watch?v=y4wC6eboPX4

Oh and thou was never rhymed with now, think about it, it rhymed with you. Has there ever been a bigger meme than "thow"?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=NxVOIj7mvWI
youtube.com/watch?v=kTr-UlyLI_I
youtube.com/watch?v=e0ybnLRf3gU
youtube.com/watch?v=XBu5tWH4w9k
youtube.com/watch?v=A05OjKCAOsg
aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
youtube.com/watch?v=iAaYgDiCa8A
youtube.com/watch?v=cP1hhwNnSm0
youtube.com/watch?v=DqpBwi594Ug
youtube.com/watch?v=Sof-6mjsNzA
youtube.com/watch?v=1-yXL80Rvvs
vocaroo.com/
youtube.com/watch?v=94Ul87W-zKs
youtube.com/watch?v=5u0JfNY_YIk
dialectsarchive.com/california-5
youtube.com/watch?v=Mz2JTX0aR18
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

All French people should die.

Guttural just like in French?

When did "thou" start to rhyme with "now"?

Around the same time that your great×10 grandmother was gargling my greatx10 grandfather's cock. Ara, ara, what a cum sock.

There are people in Ireland who use the uvular "r". In fact we have pretty much every type in our different regions

I know "aint" which is considered rednecky, was a word used by English aristocrats originally.

youtube.com/watch?v=NxVOIj7mvWI

youtube.com/watch?v=kTr-UlyLI_I

Huh that song kinda sounded like it was sung by someone with a german accent.

You are now aware that 700 years ago English sounded like Dutch.

youtube.com/watch?v=e0ybnLRf3gU

Given English's Germanic origins this really isn't that surprising. Before the Great Vowel Shift it sounded notably more Germanic in pronunciation.

it's literally just a cognate of "are not"

So basically the only wrong way to say it is in the singular.

This dude is on an island in Canada somewhere. Sounds like historic South Eastern English to me. Rhotic R but dipthongised vowels a bit more similar to Southern US, which makes sense considering immigration patterns.

youtube.com/watch?v=XBu5tWH4w9k

There's this extinct A vowel that used to define South East England that's alive in American and Australian English. From the 18th century London English began to dominate, but London English is as based on Midlands English, as old Southern English. It's a shame because London English from the 1800s onwards was absolutely disgusting.

I think it's like how people think "ye" was ever a thing, as in "ye olde english", but ye was always used as a stand-in for the thorn letter which meant th, so ye=the.

Basically people forget how things were said or what they meant, things change in the meantime, vowels shift, people forget letters like thorn existed let alone makeshift substitutes using European printing presses, and then people just assume thou is pronounced the way it would be if someone spelled it phonetically today. Luckily there are still people in England in 2017 who say thou/thee and they all rhyme it with you, or the way they say it descends from that.

Every wondered where the suffix -ton comes from in placenames, rather than town? Because the historical pronunciation of town is toon, and toon said quickly sounds like "ton".

I've heard it said that some New England and Southern accents actually preserved the colonial era English accent that has all but disappeared in Britain.

fpbp tbqh

Also the Welsh, both English and Cymraeg speakers, make wide use of the rolled r. It's also still fairly common in the north of England, not in the cities but up in the dales, people still talk funny.

Both "ain't" and "y'all" were once considered regular forms in many British and American dialects

>Dutch

No, he's talking to a Frisian.

>Because the historical pronunciation of town is toon, and toon said quickly sounds like "ton".

The pronunciation is STILL toon in Newcastle and Sunderland.

As a Dutch guy I think this sounds quite a bit like Danish.

linguistics thread?
I'm game.
Why in the process of transition to old English to french did we,insist on keeping the same spellings? I know it resulted in many types of vocabulary words but at the expense of the reader and condistency of the English language. Even french doesn't have as many inconsistencies.
It makes

Superior scouse accent coming through,
youtube.com/watch?v=A05OjKCAOsg

Although we don;t think of English as an ancient language, it's actually the longest-written of all the modern European languages, and so has preserved a great many archaisms in its spelling. Unlike America, where there was a reform of spelling, and France, where an elite academy has the authority to "update" the language, English has always gone on popular usage over academic proscription, so while words do change spellings in English, its a haphazard process that relies on people choosing the new spelling out of personal preference until enough people use it that it becomes the norm.

Is this the ugliest sound a human being is capable of producing?

I read this article some weeks about, a brief sumary about English changes thanks to it´s relations with other languages:

>aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages

It's cute CUTE

Truly a thing of beauty
youtube.com/watch?v=iAaYgDiCa8A

>bulldog breed

This is what happens when you mix a woolybacked sheep-shagging Lancastrian with a bogtrotting potato-shagging Irishman. Liverpool was a mistake.

The slum clearances in the 1960s caused it. Before that point most of Merseyside would of had either a non regional or Lancastrian accent. Most of the older generations in Liverpool speak with RP BBC style accents the scouse accent is very new and is actually really sad that it's catching on with younger generations.

I agree

youtube.com/watch?v=cP1hhwNnSm0

>all my family have westcountry rhotic accents
>I mostly have a standard fuccboi faggot english accent
please just end my misery

youtube.com/watch?v=DqpBwi594Ug
Cumbrian dialect is pretty cool.

>Most of the older generations in Liverpool speak with RP BBC style accents

Posh Liverpool isn't RP or even close. There are plenty of gentile English accents that aren't RP. There's posh Liverpool, posh Edinburgh, Potteries, etc. None of them sound RP or even close to it.

They speak Standard Northern British, they have flat a's and hard glottals and use expressions such as "me" for "my".

>There are still people in England in 2017 who still say thou/thee
What?

Saying me for my isn't mispronunciation for what it's worth. If it was just for my it would be erroneous but it's all Y's. It's even a feature of upper crust RP actually.

wtf i love whig history now

>In Sheffield, the pronunciation of the word was somewhere in between a /d/ and a /th/ sound, with the tongue at the bottom of the mouth; this led to the nickname of the "dee-dahs" for people from Sheffield. In Lancashire and West Yorkshire, ta was used as an unstressed shortening of thou

>In rural North Lancashire between Lancaster and the North Yorkshire border 'tha' is preserved in colloquial phrases such as "What would tha like for tha tea?" (What would you like for dinner), and "'appen tha waint" ("perhaps you won't" – happen being the dialect word for perhaps) and "tha knows" (you know). This usage in Lancashire is becoming rare, except for elderly and rural speakers.

That does not sound like Dutch.

I'm a German who studied English linguistics, so I'm familiar with both. I also grew up near the Dutch border (Emsland), so I can understand it fairly well (you could study it in schools in my area, but I didn't). My grandparents were all Platt speakers.

He sounds like East Coast Canada for sure. Newf or Nova Scotian or something.

It's not inconsistent. Until the mid 1800s, plebs couldn't read let alone spell so it was only a consideration for academics anyway, and they had no problem with this. Words with French origins were spelled intentionally to make their French origins obvious.

And a lot of English words ARE spelled phonetically correct -- correct for 400-500 years ago.

The result of more than 5 generations of inbreeding.

Shit, all England's acid attacks really happen in the wrong city. Acid splashers: please go to Liverpool and do the city a favour.

>would of
>in a linguistics thread
RRRRREEEEEEEEEEEE

>not appreciating the small mistakes that eventually become the correct way of saying something

Don't even try that on me.

day 1 linguistics 101
linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive

What are people actually saying when they say it, then?

Why

Insightful. Advanced. Clever.

Are the Northern/Yorkshire words thaa and thee not descended from thou and thee, then? I liked to think they'd been preserved in that form around here.

>combination of norse-influenced english and generic irish thanks to viking settlement and paddy immigration
think it is desu

That's exactly what they are yeah.

youtube.com/watch?v=Sof-6mjsNzA

The Maine accent really fascinates me, was in the service with someone from Northern Maine and he sounded just like the dude in the vid. His family's accent was even thicker, could barely understand what they were saying

>mfw hear ayuh faggot everyday for almost 3 years

>be me
>speak an outdated weird accent hat hasn't changed much in the last 500 years
>get exotic bonus wherever I go
>girls find me cute and burly for whatever reason
>can read middle high German text fluently
Could be worse I guess

How is that even related to French pronunciation?

youtube.com/watch?v=1-yXL80Rvvs

Would have, which is what actually makes sense grammatically and logically. It's not an issue of prescriptivism, "would of" is just a nonsensical malapropism.

Prove it.
>vocaroo.com/

I don't know how you talk, but I say "would have".

I get that some will take the contraction "would've" and pronounce it "would of", then reflect that back in their writing, but even then it's still wrong.

Thanks for the pedantry, but "would of" is meaningless.

reminds me of:
youtube.com/watch?v=94Ul87W-zKs

Swiss?

It's god tier
youtube.com/watch?v=5u0JfNY_YIk

Before the throaty 'r' came into vogue around the time of the french revolution, the rolled 'r' was the norm.

lol, sometimes I wish I had an interesting accent, I'm from some bumfuck part of Central California and people still talk with a hint of of a Midwest accent as do I (weird for a bean). People from Southern California and the Bay sound generic as all fuck though

dialectsarchive.com/california-5

California isn't generic at all. It's quite obvious to me when people are from California.

I think you just don't notice it since you are from there yourself.

>mfw east riding masterrace

youtube.com/watch?v=Mz2JTX0aR18

Never really thought of it that way, I've met people from all over the country and the general consensus always was we spoke the clearest English (someone once told me we have the "Newscaster accent") or sounded like surfers with the exception of guys from the rural parts of Northern and Central California. Then there's those people with that weird fag accent in LA and San Fran

>Newscaster accent

Honestly, I always think of Chicago or something when I try to imagine newscasters.

Yup, Swiss.

I met a cab driver in the CA Inland Empire with a perfect Newscaster Accent, he sounded like a natural Cronkite, the older Californians are more likely to have the Newscaster Accent

North Yorkshire and Westmorland are cosy af desu

As my Great Grandfather liked to say, "You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can't tell him much."

It's funny, Westmorlanders and Cumbrians have much greater landscapes than, yet aren't nearly as boastful as Yorkshiremen.

I have something very close to a newscaster accent, but that happened kind of by accident. I'm from the PNW, and thought the accent up here sounded terrible (it has some features of the Northern Cities Vowel shift, which makes everything sound nasal), so I deliberately dropped that part of my speech patterns. The combination of a West Coast accent and neutral vowels ends up sounding very close to what broadcasters learn.

Yorkshiremen split the atomic nucleus and invented football
Just be thankful we're both northern masterrace and not from that there London

Yorkshire "men" are barely primates.
>"Yorkshire was a mistake" -t.god

source on that quote?

It's called the Holy Bible, a filthy illiterate Yorkshire ape like you wouldn't understand.

Californians definitely sound like they're from California, and it's not a nice "newscaster" accent. Makes you want to hit the person with a shovel.

Mild mid-western accents are the most pleasing to listen to, IMO.

lancaster mentioned, truly god's english

Which part? Leviticus 12?

It's near the back, after God talks about how much he hates the French, but before he boasts of his hatred for the Germans.

I always find the relative treelessness of the UK kind of eery and fucked up... like what the hell did you guys do? Sheep, not even once.

Yeah but the moorlands are beautiful to drive/cycle through.

You Christians sure are a contentious people.

Our ancestors were intelligent people, so they rid the island of its forests (basically just ursine honeypots for unsuspecting humans, the fucking grizzly cunts) and turned it into farmland for our beloved bovines

I do wish there were more trees in places but a bracken and heather covered fellside can extremely beautiful

>666
Yeah this guy knows about the bible.

County Durham here, can agree

Lol yeah fucking right.

Can I help you?

This is why the academy français IS so great. It updates the spelling to stay in line with pronunciation. England was always and always be an absolute bodge-job nation.

Where are you from?

As mentioned, I'm Swiss, our local dialect has a lot in common with middle high German because we skipped most of the Vowel/Consonant shifts of modern High German.

Oh right. I thought you were British. Sorry about that. I could believe a Swiss person could have an old German accent.

>academy français
%)

I like the sound of that Old Yankee accent you hear in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. I think you're referring to that very annoying California "accent" where every single statements ends like its a question. Very common in the Urban parts of LA and the areas around San Fran and ballSactown.

>Mild mid-western accents are the most pleasing to listen to, IMO.

We still have people in CenCal, the High Deserts and the Northernmost part of CA that have a hint of Midwest. People forget that CA is pretty big and that the places around LA and the Bay are inhabited yoo

People in the UK with 500 year old accents are called Scots. Irish people sound like Shakespeare did, give or take a bit of Irish influence.

Weird ass combination of Massachusetts accent and Canadian. Makes perfect sense that it comes out like that though. I mean, Maine is right between Mass and Canada.