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British English- I have questions
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to Escribano)
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quote:
American English is derived from Elizabethan English I understand i.e. the spelling. Not sure about the slang, that is of its time, I guess. I can’t say petrol for gas anymore and it’s freeway or autoroute rather than motorway now, for me. Working on autostrada.
You are on to something that linguists have known for a long time, Simon. In most cases, the language spoken in the colonies and overseas possessions of the former colonizer is closer to the original language spoken at the time of colonization than is the language spoken in the metropolitan center today. The reason is language changes much faster in the former metropolitan center than it does in its former possessions.
To use your example of American vs. British English, there are areas of coastal South Carolina that speak English with an Elizabethan "touch." It's not Elizabethan English as such, but it has some of the characteristics. Another example can be found in the Bay Islands (Roatan, Utila, and Guanaja) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. The inhabitants are the descendants of British pirates and privateers (from the days of plundering Spanish ships carrying silver from Peru to Spain), and they, too, speak a distinct form of English derived from earlier days.
It is interesting to reflect on why Latin American Spanish differs from Castellano. Particularly with regard to the absent theta but in other aspects as well, Latin American Spanish is in some ways closer to Andalu than it is to the Spanish of the Real Academia Espanola and that of Madrid, Central, and Northern Spain. The reason is the Conquistadors such as the great captains Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro came, not from Andalucia but from the adjacent province of Extremadura, as did many of those who followed them and colonized Central and South America. The Spanish dialect spoken in Extremadura is close to that of Southwestern Andalucia. thus, from the beginning Latin American Spanish took on the complexion of that spoken by the Spaniards from Extremadura and Southwestern Andalucia.
It would be interesting to know how Castellano was spoken in Madrid in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, at the time the Spanish discovered and began colonizing Latin America. As mentioned above, linguists who study the evolution of languages know that language changes and evolves much more quickly in the metropolitan cities than it does in the rural areas and overseas colonies and former colonies. It is possible that at that time Spanish spoken in Madrid was closer to that spoken in Andalucia than it is today. Maybe not. But it would make an interesting study. Someone may have already done one, but I am not aware of it. Along that same theme of language changing much less in some of the far-flung colonies than it does in the metropole, there are linguists who say that the "purest" Spanish spoken today exists in parts of Colombia. I suppose by "purest" they mean it is closer to the Spanish spoken five hundred years ago, and it must have been that spoken in Estremadura and Southwestern Andalucia, as that is where most of the colonizers came from.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 11 2023 18:50:38
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Stu
Posts: 2537
Joined: Jan. 30 2007
From: London (the South of it), England
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to estebanana)
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quote:
Number one, who decided potatoes and sausage was called Bangers and Mash?
Sausage and Mash is also rhyming slang for cash.
Also known as 'dosh' in the 80s and 'Wonga' in the 90s. My favorite slang term for money was always 'portraits'. '50 portraits. Wallop!'
(Portraits of her majesty) or his majesty now.
I'm sure you can Google all this, so I guess you're more interested in having a good ol chin wag about it.
Sausages used to pop in the pan in ye olde days. Bang!
I'm happy to talk about our bastardised version of your wonderful language.😉
Jokes aside,
I must say from over here in Blighty. I often hear lots of English folk moaning about Americanisms.
Blah blah, the spelling. Blah blah it's rubbish, not garbage. Blah blah it's a full stop, not a period Etc
What a load of old Codswallop!
I have never felt this way and have always absolutely loved what has happened to the English language in America. Not as a replacement but an addition. I mean why not?! language is meant to change and evolve.
Some fun ones off top of head.
Bloke, geezer, chap = man
Willy, Hampton, Old chap = man's appendage
Butcher's, shufty, peek = look
Some of my dad's favorites
Chuffed to monkeys = extremely pleased
Donkeys years = a very long time
A Wind up merchant = someone who likes to tease/prank
Mum's favourite
Cack handed - clumsy
Galavanting - wandering about with no purpose
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Date Sep. 12 2023 20:37:41
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kitarist
Posts: 1716
Joined: Dec. 4 2012
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
quote:
American English is derived from Elizabethan English I understand i.e. the spelling. Not sure about the slang, that is of its time, I guess. I can’t say petrol for gas anymore and it’s freeway or autoroute rather than motorway now, for me. Working on autostrada.
You are on to something that linguists have known for a long time, Simon. In most cases, the language spoken in the colonies and overseas possessions of the former colonizer is closer to the original language spoken at the time of colonization than is the language spoken in the metropolitan center today. The reason is language changes much faster in the former metropolitan center than it does in its former possessions.
To use your example of American vs. British English, there are areas of coastal South Carolina that speak English with an Elizabethan "touch." It's not Elizabethan English as such, but it has some of the characteristics. Another example can be found in the Bay Islands (Roatan, Utila, and Guanaja) off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. The inhabitants are the descendants of British pirates and privateers (from the days of plundering Spanish ships carrying silver from Peru to Spain), and they, too, speak a distinct form of English derived from earlier days.
As far as how English is spoken, I remember reading an article a couple of years ago saying that the 'American accent' English is actually how the British spoke, and it is the British who changed over the ensuing centuries to what we consider now the 'British accent' (all of this broadly speaking).
Another example might be the pronunciation of Quebecois French versus the French in France - I am told the Quebecois version sounds like a rough 'peasant' French, likely how it was spoken back in the 17 century or so; the divergence since then is due to the source region language evolving much faster.
quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
It is interesting to reflect on why Latin American Spanish differs from Castellano. Particularly with regard to the absent theta but in other aspects as well, Latin American Spanish is in some ways closer to Andalu than it is to the Spanish of the Real Academia Espanola and that of Madrid, Central, and Northern Spain. The reason is the Conquistadors such as the great captains Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro came, not from Andalucia but from the adjacent province of Extremadura, as did many of those who followed them and colonized Central and South America. The Spanish dialect spoken in Extremadura is close to that of Southwestern Andalucia. thus, from the beginning Latin American Spanish took on the complexion of that spoken by the Spaniards from Extremadura and Southwestern Andalucia.
It would be interesting to know how Castellano was spoken in Madrid in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, at the time the Spanish discovered and began colonizing Latin America. As mentioned above, linguists who study the evolution of languages know that language changes and evolves much more quickly in the metropolitan cities than it does in the rural areas and overseas colonies and former colonies. It is possible that at that time Spanish spoken in Madrid was closer to that spoken in Andalucia than it is today. Maybe not. But it would make an interesting study. Someone may have already done one, but I am not aware of it. Along that same theme of language changing much less in some of the far-flung colonies than it does in the metropole, there are linguists who say that the "purest" Spanish spoken today exists in parts of Colombia. I suppose by "purest" they mean it is closer to the Spanish spoken five hundred years ago, and it must have been that spoken in Estremadura and Southwestern Andalucia, as that is where most of the colonizers came from.
The name of historian and linguist Peter Boyd-Bowman comes up a lot in the context of studies on the regional origin of the Spanish colonists to America (and where they settled) - the argument being that knowing that informs as about the influence of particular ways Spanish was spoken on the respective regional destinations in the Americas.
For example, in 1956 he published a study called "The Regional Origins of the Earliest Spanish Colonists of America" regarding the period 1493-1580 which is still one of the main references today. A version of the study is freely available here (direct link to pdf)
In the first half of the first, Antillean, period (1493-1519), Spanish settlers were overwhelmingly from Andalusia - more than 60% - and almost 80% of that was from Sevilla and its 'sailors quarter of Triana' - in other words, fully half of all Spanish settlers were from Sevilla! While the proportion of Andalusians declined after that, it was still the lead origin region for that first period with 40% of the settlers, followed by Old Castile with 18% and Extremadura with 14%.
After that, for the second period 1520-1539, Andalusia is still on top with 32%, the decline from 40% being taken up by Extremadura and New Castile.
A very recent article collection from 2021 - "Sociolinguistic Approaches to Sibilant Variation in Spanish" - is probably a great place to get a sense of the most updated thinking on the 'genealogy' and evolution of spoken Spanish and its causes, particularly the first chapter "An overview of the sibilant merger and its development in Spanish". Though I was a bit taken aback when I realized that one of the key diagrams, Fig. 1.2, misinterpreted the Boyd-Bowman data. What it presents as percentages for the whole Antillean period of 1493-1519 is actually the data for only the first half of that period, as seen in the original Boyd-Bowman studies and charts. Strange.. but with that caveat, the rest of the redrawn data seems correct. A preview with table of contents, etc., is here (auto-redirects to pdf)
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_____________________________
Konstantin
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Date Sep. 13 2023 19:26:01
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Piwin
Posts: 3562
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to kitarist)
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quote:
I am told the Quebecois version sounds like a rough 'peasant' French
Peasants and kings. Where Quebec and France French really started to diverge was when we butchered those inbred, sociopathic human equivalents of a chihuaha we call royalty and aristocracy. In the process we started talking like the nascent bourgeoisie, about the only group at the time that was in a position to not care all that much about mimicking the king's French. Bourgeois French became the new standard. Royalty would linger for quite a while, like the smell of a bad fart that just won't go away, but the shift towards bourgeois French had already begun. We hadn't realized yet that the bourgeoisie would become their own class of inbred sociopaths, but hey, hindsight 20/20.
Anyway, the Canadians missed out on the fun since they had moved to British rule a few decades prior, so they just kept the old standard based on the king's French. Which is perfectly understandable. I mean, if they had wanted to switch to bourgeois speech like us, they would've had to build a guillotine, get all the CITES papers for it, pay an extra seat for the guillotine because it supposedly won't fit in the captain's closet even though you know it would and the steward is just being a d1ck because he can, spend several weeks on the boat watching crappy Steve Carell movies, behead the King, then travel all the way back to Canada, all the while dreading that somehow your ultra-Catholic mother-in-law back in Brittany, who was the reason you decided to move to Canada in the first place, would hear that you were going to England and would make the short trip there to try and hunt you down and vomit the last 4 decades of pent-up sermons she hasn't had the opportunity to preach at you yet. Life's too short for that kind of hassle.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Sep. 13 2023 22:32:39
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Piwin
Posts: 3562
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to RobF)
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quote:
Jimmy Fallon reruns.
I think I'd just jump overboard and take my chances swimming across! 
@Morante I love English people. Royalty on the other hand...
@kitarist Just riffing.  Sorry, I should've added some emojis or something to clarify the tone.
FWIW though, I do think it's worth questioning why people have told you that Quebecois sounds like "peasant French". Some French people will say it out of prejudice. Some Quebecois will say it out of a sense of pride, as they have reappropriated the concept and fitted it within a broader political narrative about their own origins.
But the truth is that, at least within academia, there isn't much agreement on the origins of Quebecois. I think what I was saying about Quebecois having been influenced by the old language of the court is probably true, but many would dispute that. Here's the riddle: at that time, very few people in France outside of the ruling classes actually spoke French. Current estimates are that around the time of the Revolution in 1789, somewhere between 10-15% of the population could speak French (presumably even fewer when the first French settlers went to Canada). Those 10-15% were mostly the ruling or professional classes, plus the larger urban areas like Paris where people from all around had gathered and, having no mutually intelligible language to communicate, developed a creole/koine using French as superstrate. Very few peasants would have spoken French. Some of the languages they spoke (especially in the center-north area) may have been mutually intelligible with French, but many weren't.
The riddle of Quebecois is that the early settlers came from all over France, yet very early on they had developed a stable form of French. Two of the heavy hitters (in terms of how many settlers they represented) were speakers of Norman and Poitevin, which are not thought to have been mutually intelligible according to modern criteria. Yet somehow they developed a form of French that just a few decades later was universally considered as one of the "purest" forms of French around. There's no agreement on how exactly it happened, but somehow it did.*
Canadians were speaking French in their everyday lives two centuries before most French peasants started speaking it. In France, the Revolution leaders launched efforts to eradicate regional languages. It started with Henri Grégoire's 1794 report explicitly entitled "On the necessity and means to annihilate minority languages (...)". (well "patois", but in modern parlance we'd call that minority languages and dialects). By 1860, according to one government survey there was still about half the country that didn't understand French. The government would take its genocidal policy (in the sense of cultural genocide) up a notch during the 3rd Republic (1870 onwards), when a combination of mandatory education in French + aggressive policies against the use of regional languages would finally achieve what the Revolution leaders had started. There are hardly any left now, but a decade or so ago there were still some centenarians around who remembered what those days were like. It really wasn't all that long ago.
So personally I'm just not quite sure what it would mean for Quebecois to sound like "peasant French". To be perfectly honest, for your average French person, every form of the language spoken abroad sounds like "peasant French". Belgian, Swiss, Canadian, Senegalese, Ivorian, etc. etc. Why? It starts with xe and ends in nophobia but that's all the hints I'm going to give you (edit: just to be crystal clear: I'm definitely not saying that's why you said it!! Just that I think if you go up the chain of information all the way up to the source, that's what you'll probably find.)
*Personally I lean towards Barbaud's hypothesis, but many view it as outdated and lacking empirical evidence (which are fair criticisms). Barbaud argues that the "King's daughters" were the main factor in Quebecois becoming what it is. In the mid 17th century, Colbert decided to send around 800 women (later called the "King's daughters) to New France in order to sort out the gender balance (I forget the exact numbers, but before that something like 5% of the settlers were women and that was it). Colbert recruited these women in institutions that cared for the destitute. Supposedly it was on a voluntary basis but... well who knows. Somewhere between a third to half of them would have come from Paris. And Barbaud argues that they were educated in French before being sent off. Meaning that these women would have spoken French, and a lot of them would have also spoken the Parisian koine. They would become the mothers of almost an entire generation of settlers in Quebec so an argument can be made that the language of Quebec was this mix of French and Parisian koine that this generation picked up from their mothers. To me that narrative fits with my own observations, where I just see a lot more similarities between early Quebecois and court + Parisian koine than what I'd expect to see if they had formed another creole/koine with French superstrate directly from their own regional languages. But that's probably a minority position these days, so definitely don't take my word for it.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Sep. 15 2023 18:22:55
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to kitarist)
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quote:
P.S. Where did Bill go?
I have been here all along, Konstantin. I had nothing to add to my observation above regarding how language changes much faster in the Metropole than it does in the former colonies, using the examples of British English and English as it is spoken in parts of coastal South Carolina and, in particular, the Bay Islands of Honduras. As well as Latin American Spanish (which varies greatly from country to country) and Spanish according to the Real Academia Espanola.
I have found your and Piwin's take on the subject very interesting and informative. I learned long ago to exercise restraint and avoid interjecting any speculation on my part when others have researched various elements of a topic and are holding forth with conclusions reached. This is why I enjoy being a member of the Foro. We all have a love of flamenco in common, but there are so many like yourself who have such varied interests and can speak to them with authority--language, linguistics, expansion of the universe, black holes, quantum entanglement, Conquistadors, Al Andalus under the Caliphate of Cordoba, and dozens of other topics. Where else but the Foro would one find such varied interests tied together by a genre of music?
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Sep. 19 2023 21:03:02
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estebanana
Posts: 9354
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: British English- I have questions (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
quote:
P.S. Where did Bill go?
I have been here all along, Konstantin. I had nothing to add to my observation above regarding how language changes much faster in the Metropole than it does in the former colonies, using the examples of British English and English as it is spoken in parts of coastal South Carolina and, in particular, the Bay Islands of Honduras. As well as Latin American Spanish (which varies greatly from country to country) and Spanish according to the Real Academia Espanola.
I have found your and Piwin's take on the subject very interesting and informative. I learned long ago to exercise restraint and avoid interjecting any speculation on my part when others have researched various elements of a topic and are holding forth with conclusions reached. This is why I enjoy being a member of the Foro. We all have a love of flamenco in common, but there are so many like yourself who have such varied interests and can speak to them with authority--language, linguistics, expansion of the universe, black holes, quantum entanglement, Conquistadors, Al Andalus under the Caliphate of Cordoba, and dozens of other topics. Where else but the Foro would one find such varied interests tied together by a genre of music?
Bill
TS Elliot poems mention this.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Dec. 19 2023 6:39:18
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