Thanks Bob - quite interesting. On our Public Television (PBS) a few years
ago they had an 8-hour series on the history of the English-> American
language with even a small bit on variations occurring in other colonies.
That series started with showing how different spelling conventions and
different pronunciations of the same words arose in Britain as a result of
which invaders took which part of the isle. Within the U.S. you can then
track our regional differences on the east coast (New England vs. Suthren
for example) back to the main source of emigration from England, and you can
track our regional differences in the mid-west to the proportions of émigrés
from the east coast plus other non-English sources. By the time you get to
the west coast, everything is homogenized.
Stan
Bob Walkden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> pronounced:
>
> Hi,
>
> actually the real reason is the Great Vowel Shift (GVS)
> (http://www.icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/vowels.html) and the failure
> of spelling to keep up with the spoken language.
>
> It's obvious that a standardised spelling can never accurately reflect
> pronunciation, since pronunciation changes over time and in space. This
> seems particularly true of English. The Great Vowel Shift took place over
> several hundred years, during which time English was also subject to all
> the other 'normal' changes that take place in any language. But also
> during that time Britain was expanding the Empire, and establishing
> colonies all over the world. So a colony populated by people mainly
> from the South-West of England will start as a snapshot of the
> pronunciation of that area, during that particular period of the GVS.
> Since small isolated populations such as colonies tend to be quite
> conservative
> linguistically the pronunciation will change less than, and usually in a
> different
> direction to, the pronunciation of the mother population. So, many
> colonies all over the world each start with a different geographical
> accent and from a different point in the GVS, and their modern
> descendants' pronunciation reflects this.
>
> A standardised spelling system could not reflect this diversity, which
> is why attempts such as 'nu speling' are doomed to fail. So we get apparent
> absurdities like 'cough' and 'plough'. The 'gh' in these sorts of word betray
> their Germanic origins. It's easy to demonstrate with English/OE/German
> cognates:
>
> daughter / dohtor / tochter (Greek thygater)
> thought / gethoht / gedacht
> eight / aehta / acht
> fight / fehtan / fechten
> usw.
>
> Early in the history of English the 'gh' was pronounced similarly to
> the German 'ch', and in some British accents (esp. Scots, which also didn't
> undergo the GVC for some reason) there is still a trace of it in some words.
>
> Globalisation (particularly the dominance of US films and TV) means
> that accents will probably converge. Already in Britain TV, and other
> social changes, have led to a flattening of English accents, in particular
> to the rise of so-called 'Estuary English', which is the dialect and
> accent spoken around the region of the Thames Estuary and causes much
> wailing and gnashing of teeth among people who think it is a 'lazy' or
> somehow degraded dialect. Wrt globalisation I remember talking to one of
> my nephews when he was little about 'Sesame Street' and he corrected my
> English pronunciation of Oliver ('Olivuh') to the American 'Ah-luhver' :o).
>
> As internationalisation continues, I predict a kind of rolling back of
> the GVS so that the diphthongised vowels will become, once again, like
> their continental equivalents, and that the UN (or some such body) will
> standardise and 'simplify' English spelling again. I put simplify in
> quotes because once you understand the history, the British English spelling
> becomes fairly rational, predictable and understandable, whereas Webster's
> standardisation seems distinctly arbitrary in many cases - for instance, why
> change 'plough' and leave 'though' and so many others?
>
> A little bit of knowledge of linguistic history makes spelling tests
> so much easier! Apparent absurdities are usually interesting indicators
> of history, and rarely as absurd as they seem at face value.
>
> ---
>
> Bob
>
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Saturday, April 07, 2001, 9:11:06 AM, you wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>
>> I would have thuft that was obvious. It rhymes with 'cough' and
>> 'through' and 'although'.
>
>> ---
>
>> Bob
>
>> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>> Friday, April 06, 2001, 11:51:09 PM, you wrote:
>
>
>>> Colour and azma I can live with, but why don't you pronounce "plough" pluff?
>>> Ed
>
>
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