Interesting facts about the history of English dialects

Many of the things I go off on are just me messing around with ideas I have no business writing about, but linguistics is one topic on which I actually know my stuff. Too bad it is very boring to most people and does me little good gaining a reading audience!

But a recent book that I read I would suggest to anyone. 'The history of the mother tongue and how it got that way' by Bill Bryson I devoured in the last few days--the closest thing I get to page-turning fluff. (Those sensitive to this kind of thing might avoid the chapter on swearing, even though it is quite fascinating). I have known quite a lot about this topic already (I taught a section of History of English at BYU), and normally I do prefer to get more into the technicalities, but this book is full of fairly interesting and amusing gee-whiz facts about English that most people would probably be interested in and also not know.

A few things I didn't know. Who doesn't love reading things translated into English around the world like this message on an eraser in Japan: 'This product is environmental kind and will self destruct in Mother Earth.

One fairly curious point that I think would surprise most people is that American pronunciation, rather than being 'newer' or more modern, is actually often a preservation of archaic pronunciations because they were isolated geographically during a particular period of change in the Isles themselves.

Most people are aware that in the UK there are some fairly diverse pronunciations, and that in a much bigger area, we over here, on the other hand, kinda sound all just Americans. This is because the colonization process ended up sampling and freezing snapshots of a larger and more rapidly changing set of dialectal varieties because it stashed particular variables across the ocean where they wouldn't change along with the others.

Also probably something I would add to this theory is that of the two Americans are put more on guard about how they say things. UK people have always been considering anything said over here abominable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the word talented a 'vile and barbarous' coinage of America. It was actually first recorded in Britain in 1422; as most words, it happened there first and actually only gained the horrible notoriety that one would imagine when using the word talented (or customize, etc.) when noticed being said by Americans. Consequently many famous Anglophiles like Franklin and Jefferson are extremely apologetic about anything considered American--resulting in the likelyhood that everything different over here is likely to be older, and not newer, because we have less confidence to innovate.

For instance, most movies if they were portraying Queen Elizabeth I, would certainly have her pronounce vowel in 'plant' more like the 'ah' in 'want,' If anything they usually have historical figures sound even more British than the British today if that is possible. Turns out Bess would have said her /ae/'s just like 'Mericans do today.

The change to the long 'ah' vowel actually happened in the UK in the 1800's, so this would be an example of the US preserving the former pronunciation even though it usually gets characterized as being the upstart of the two speech communities. The UK is the hotseat of linguistic diversity and change in English and always has been, and the US is actually the more uniform, and it turns out, conservative, of the two.