Follow-up to: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
To put in context how freaking awesome this guy is: name a country in the world, and he can perform every dialect in the region flawlessly, as well as tell you how it originated and developed over time.
Awesomeness indicator #2: Rocco did the dialect work on the "Indiana Jones" movies. 'Nuff said.
Yesterday, my wife e-mailed the "Did Americans in 1776 have British Accents" post (http://www.nicholasjohnpatrick.com/post/767354896/did-americans-in-1776-have-british-accents) to Rocco. Here's his reply, posted here with his permission:
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That is very cool, and I found most of the post accurate, except at the end when he speculates on why New York and New England may be non-rhotic.
There's a small contradiction: if their connections were British and British was itself rhotic, then that doesn’t explain how they lost their Rs. (Except that it could have happened 100 years after the Revolutionary War.)
England’s journey toward a non-rhotic prestige accent followed the Revolutionary War, a time when we were pretty cut off from them. We were in a state of almost continual war with them through the war of 1812 and even through the Civil War when they supported the South more than the North.
Much later, in Victorian times, wealthy residents of Boston, Philadelphia and New York sent their children to England to be educated and their prestige accents became reflective of those schools’ emphasis on RP. That persisted well through the 1950s (and shows up in accents we call Boston Brahmin, Philadelphia Mainline and New York 400). It may well be that until then New York wasn’t terribly non-rhotic, but I would love to read a real study on this.
Immigration also had a huge effect on New York and New England speech. How much that accounts for the rhoticity question is hard to say. But is has to be a factor. Still, the result is surprising because notice how Boston, famously the center of Irish immigration (a heavily rhotic accent, then and today) somehow ended up with a non-rhotic accent in a country that is mostly rhotic.
Incidentally, the author doesn’t comment on US Southern prestige accents that were non-rhotic almost from the start. The reason for that? They were raised by their black nannies and African languages are non-rhotic. Southerners hate to hear this, but their prestige non-rhotic plantation accents are the product of slave speech! A lovely topic for the 4th of July as we contemplate liberty...
43 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadother than that, though, i didnt get much from this
Are you sure about that? Does "rhotic" vs "non-rhotic" even have any meaning outside the context of English?
Frinstance a non-rhotic accent isn't about not being about to say "er". A non-rhotic speaker will say, frinstance "her father" with an "err" sound on "her" and an "a" sound on "father".
I think you're confusing vowel shifts with rhotacism. A non-rhotic speaker will not pronounce the r in either "her" or "father". It's quite possible the vowel shift at the end of father happened in response to the disappearance of the rhotic r, but it is a separate effect.
I'm still skeptical about rhoticity in African languages.
Perhaps there's a continuum of rhoticity, but there are definitely dialects that would not pronounce the R in "her".
What I think you're getting at - and one of the cool things about Iceland - is that the language hasn't changed all that much since it was introduced back then. This means that modern Icelanders can read the Sagas (written in the 10th and 11th centuries) with relative ease. The majority of people will read them in the same way we read Shakespeare or Dickens (with modern spelling and some footnotes), but with some effort they can be read by most well-educated Icelanders in their initial forms.
While isolation had a great deal to do with this initially, nowadays it's mostly because of the work of the Icelandic Language Institute, which religiously updates the language to add new words for concepts that didn't previously exist. They also work with the Icelandic Naming Committee, to maintain the list of acceptable first names that Icelandic children can be given - if the name you want to give your child isn't on the list of previously-used names, you have to submit it to the Committee to make sure that it is appropriate (i.e. can be spelled in the Icelandic alphabet and fits into Icelandic grammar).
That sounds a lot like the French Academy; but so far as I know, French has precipitously changed quite as incomprehensibly as English, and has not remained stable (save for an expanded vocabulary) as you say Icelandic has. Why do you think the Institute succeeded and the Academy failed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
An Icelandic colleague told me that the Icelandic word for computer is "Tölva", stemming from tala and Völva, respectively "number" and the name for a kind of female prophets from Nordic mythology. I could get behind this, much more than the (failed) Danish attempt to call it a "datamat" (from data and automat).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%B6lva
Over 500 years ago, the people in Sweden and Denmark spoke East Scandinavian, which was one language, but that had a "dialect continuum" from south to north. But in the 1500s, Sweden gained independence, and both countries adopted protestantism, which meant both countries translated the bible. And with that action the languages actually split with Danish gravitating towards how it was spoken and spelled in Copenhagen, and Swedish gravitating towards how it was spoken and spelled in Stockholm.
So Swedish and Danish are almost the same language, they've only been split for 500 years. But since Denmark is a more densely populated country, it means that Danish has changed faster. Swedish has been going through similar transformations as Danish, except slower.
For example, Danish has gone further in vowelshifting y to ö, compare the word for key: "nyckel" in Swedish, "nøgel" in Danish. In some Swedish dialects people say "nöckel", but it hasn't made it to standard Swedish.
Both languages have done consonant softening of g to j and k to g or ch, but Danish has also softened t to d, v to u, and p to b.
And the sole reason for this is that Denmark has a six times higher population density than Sweden, with roughly the same population.
Although the other theory on Danish language, namely that they've all stuffed their mouths full of potatoes before speaking, is still somewhat plausible. :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486017
http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_ac...
How do you say the first A in PASTA? "Same A as in MAT or CAT" "Same A as in FATHER"
How do you say the "oo" in ROOF? "Like the "oo" in FOOT" "Like the "oo" in FOOD"
I ended up with "Northeast New England" accent
I'm sorry, but this can not be true. Does he speak every single language of the world including each dialect of each language?! This is plainly impossible. Maybe you think that the whole world speaks English, or maybe for you "world" only refers to English speaking countries. Even in this case, I doubt this guy "performs flawlessly" every English dialect.
Agreed though; whatever he means it must be an exaggeration.
No, I'm not exaggerating re: his range and ability - Rocco really is that good.
English is not my mother tonge and I don't live in an English speaking country, so I really get angry when someone equates "world" to "English speaking countries". To start with, there is much more people in the world that do not know any English that people fluent in this language.
That was my point.
I'd believe that when I hear that - I'd be flabbergasted if he can convince me in more than one of the three main accents of Cape Town, South Africa.
Hollywood actors have tried and failed to do a convincing South African accent. the only one who came close enough was, surprisingly, Leonardo Dicaprio
Can't find any recording of him online, unfortunately - he's the kind of guy who teaches actors because he's one of the few who really knows how to do it.
You're right, though - accents from South Africa are notoriously difficult.
The changes that all languages undergo tends to follow predictable patterns. Vowels can shift together, not at random: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift