American English pronunciation!

Discussion in 'History and Culture' started by snakestretcher, Nov 6, 2012.

  1. Diuretic

    Diuretic Well-Known Member

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    Blame Noah Webster :dual:
     
  2. Mushroom

    Mushroom Well-Known Member

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    Wow, this is hardly true at all.

    Linguistically American English really broke off on it's own around 1800. This is when the US started to expand into areas that had large non-English populations (specifically Spanish and French). And in a great many ways we also adopted the various Indian words and used them as our own as well.

    Add to this the early 1800's immigration of large numbers of Germanic peoples, then by the Civil War the influx of Asians and others like the Irish (and post-Civil War the Nordics).

    The change in the language was more due to the larger "melting pot" we had here to create our own language. And much the same was true in places like Australia and Canada. Canadian English is more like US than British English, for the same reasons of cross-cultural influence.

    And much of the "British Accent" is fake. Known linguistically as "Received Pronunciation" (and sometimes as "BBC English"), it became the common accent in the mid-20th century as Radio spread it's usage. But it is fake, just like the Mid-Atlantic Accent is.

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  3. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    That's one I've noticed, also. They have bizarrely slow speech patterns. It sometimes gives the impression that the brain is struggling to find words.
     
  4. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    also .... one that really grinds my gears:

    "off of"

    awful grammar. just plain wrong.

    another which I've only heard Americans use, is:

    "I had went"

    not sure how an adult with 12 years of education can possibly think that's okay.
     
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  5. Pycckia

    Pycckia Well-Known Member

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    Overseas they do. Americans seem to be under the impression that everyone can understand English if they speak loudly enough.

    But for loud talkers, I nominate Szechuan Chinese. What sounds like bitter arguments are in fact ordinary conversations.
     
  6. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    The Chinese are easily the loudest on planet earth.
     
  7. Ritter

    Ritter Well-Known Member

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    Not to mention English is a rather ugly language.

    A good thing about English grammar is that they use presens, perfect and preteritum. Also is a huge relief verbs don't have genders. French (and other Romance languages) is absolutely terrible in this sense; verbs are gendered and they could just not be fine with the three temps, they had to add a trillion more. Guess constrcting sentences like "I would have gone" was to damn easy for them and they had to give the word "go" it's very own temp to express that. Flippen heck.

    This was partially what ruined my French education. 5 years of French should result in fluency, but I am faaar from fluent. Lolz.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2017
  8. The Rhetoric of Life

    The Rhetoric of Life Banned

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    I'm in London, but I once wrote a song in AE because I wanted 'Van Gogh' to rhyme with 'know' -
    Meant using the AE spelling of 'favorite'.
     
    Last edited: Apr 28, 2017
  9. longlost

    longlost Member

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    More or less reminds me of the old joke when someone asked where something was located at and told not to end a sentence with a preposition....you know the rest I'm sure...
     
  10. Ole Ole

    Ole Ole Banned

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    I say tomato crisp. I say English is difficult in start shot.
     
    Last edited: May 15, 2017

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