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Great Vowel Shift

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Re: Great Vowel Shift

#241

Post by ascorbic »

adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I've noticed this recently among some of my American colleagues, and it's so obvious to me that at first I thought they were imitating an English accent. To my English ears, standard American pronounces the "t"s in butter and water as "d", and hadn't realised that some accents do have the glottal "t". I think it is mostly in people from the East coast.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#242

Post by batiudrami »

brigandish wrote: post #220
tabtab wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because "V" and "B" used to be pronounced the same ;-)

It certainly reinforces what I know about techies that I just had to scroll all the way down to here to get past a group of them not only missing the point of a joke, but then arguing with each other pendantically over the meaning of words that add nothing to the discussion . Is bikeshedding a habit or a temperament? Glad to see someone managed to get the joke, anyway.

But everyone got the joke without the need for the follow up comment? That’s why it’s the top comment.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#243

Post by adamrezich »

ascorbic wrote: post #241
adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I've noticed this recently among some of my American colleagues, and it's so obvious to me that at first I thought they were imitating an English accent. To my English ears, standard American pronounces the "t"s in butter and water as "d", and hadn't realised that some accents do have the glottal "t". I think it is mostly in people from the East coast.

spot-on in your analysis & as is mentioned elsewhere in the replies, I think it might be a definite east-coast influence on the rest of the US population as a result of video-based social media. at least, that's my running theory!

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#244

Post by adamrezich »

azepoi wrote: post #236
adamrezich wrote: post #98

related, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since…

I notice s being pronounced sh. It shtrikes me as more frequent now.

while we're on the topic, my younger-than-me girlfriend from Idaho says "warsh" for "wash," which until now I fully associated with only people the age of my late grandmother. truly, the wide gamut of American accents is something to behold!

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#245

Post by brabel »

kebman wrote: post #104

I'm amazed! Late Middle English ‘boat’ sounds just like modern Norwegian ‘båt.’ :p I heard the stories that Scandinavians could go to Britain and it would only take a short while to get used to the language. Kind of like Norwegians going to Denmark today. In writing Danish and Norwegian is almost the same, but it takes some getting used to the pronounciation. There's a fantastic dialogue illustrating the similarity o…

Wow, so English sounded just like a Scandinavian language! I knew old English words are often similar to the equivalent modern Scandinavian languages in writing (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) but I was not sure if they sounded similar.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#246

Post by presentation »

bluGill wrote: post #97
CogitoCogito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? I think the fact that it is a lingua franca is one of the main reasons keeping any spelling reform from occurring actually. It's in far too wide-spread use and there isn't any centralize authority that would do the spelling reform. Maybe take solace in the likely fact that it written English and spoken English will probably o…

To be considered a competent reader of a standard newspaper you need a 6 years of education in English, while only 5 in Spanish. I understand Japanese requires 9 years of school for the same feat (I'm don't know how to verify this claim, but it seems reasonable). There there is a very real cost to not mapping spoken and written languages: kids need to spend more time in school learning basic reading skill - time that…

In the region, countries like Korea and Vietnam did move away from Chinese characters - though I'm not sure what impact that's had on educational outcomes and time spent studying different stuff.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#247

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tabtab wrote: post #114
Aromasin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.

I had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points. If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private . All things being equal, parents want t…

>but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private //

I correct my childrens' pronunciations. I've honestly never thought of it as a class thing. In part it's "inherited", so it could have consciously been a class thing for one of my ancestors. But really to me it just seems necessary for preliterate speakers to understand the proper way to say a word based on its spelling, which they don't know. I find myself correcting USA-ian word use ("garbage") and pronunciation far more with my youngest than I had to at that age with my oldest ... we probably let him watch too much TV (several shows, like Paw Patrol have shifted to USA versions from British English versions).

It's hard to discern every phoneme from a new word, and hard to say some of them.

I do shift my accent, and vocabulary, to mark myself as a local I guess (when I'm back in that area of the country). If I get to use certain words in their localised (to about a 20mi long area) meaning it makes me happy for some reason. But I've never consciously worked on my accent to sound more/less posh; but have modified it to be more understood.

My wife is what I call a 'sympathetic speaker', she very quickly adopts the accent of those she's speaking with. An interesting phenomenon.

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#248

Post by Cthulhu_ »

coolreader18 wrote: post #162
gchucky wrote: post #3

The vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father and son demonstrating the changes.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

It's funny, for at least the first example, original pronunciation just sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, which is especially interesting considering that's intended to be a less formal/"lower class" accent. Reminds me of something I heard once that the modern american accent is actually closer to the british accent at the time of the revolutionary war, and it's the british accent that's changed more s…

There's an accents guy on Wired's youtube channel that has a really interesting slew of videos on accents. His latest ones are a bird's eye view of American accents: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wired+accent+ex...

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#249

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ggm wrote: post #229

Interesting how in "micro" sense we know people knew it was happening ("young people today.." nothing changes) Yet, its a 300 year process. One of those "I was there" -no, you weren't things. Like sea level rise. You see a bit of it. The totality is a story which spans generations. Nobody owns all of it.

And yet, people experience changes in accents during their own life; they hear recordings from themselves from the 70's and think "did I really talk like that?".

One thing though, take older movies with a grain of salt; in old movies, actors were taught a specific accent (called the Mid-Atlantic accent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent).

Re: Great Vowel Shift

#250

Post by Tor3 »

GlennS wrote: post #209
Koshkin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I still wish it were Spanish, which is easier to learn/read and pronunciation of which is somehow easier for most people (except for native English speakers, as I've noticed).

Surely it will be a Romance/Germanic split? So Spanish is easier for speakers of French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian, and English for speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish?

What I've noticed while working on most continents is that when people learn just a little English, they can communicate better than I can if I try to learn their language. The reason is, I think, that English grammar is, in a way, so redundant that even if the speaker use wrong grammar all the time the meaning often doesn't change. You can say "I is", which is wrong, but there's no problem with understanding (at least not for non-native English speakers who are so used to hear all kinds of wrong grammar). But make a single mistake in a Romance language like Italian, and suddenly your sentence "I'm stupid" now means "You're stupid". The grammar matters. In English the grammar, for the most part (not for everything, of course) is about correctness more than meaning - which is why the language is so robust, which is one reason it works as a lingua franca: A little English knowledge goes a long way.
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