|
kitarist -> RE: British English- I have questions (Sep. 13 2023 19:26:01)
|
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)
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
|
|
|
|
