EDIT
Okay, I have no idea. I do remember having an idea for something I wanted to say when I wrote the above. But as to what that something was? Nope, no clue. But you never know when it might come back.
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
Collecting speech
American English is very different from UK English--almost a misnomer in itself, as there are so many British dialects--and about anything else. English accents pop up all over the them, usually being attributed to somewhere else. Yet American and Canadian English have a tendency to build up melodrama.
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2 comments:
The history of how the English language came about in the first place is interesting in itself and how it came to be the language mostly used in business and corporate worldwide is logical once you consider just how far reaching the British Empire was during the expansion. It was a polyglot language to begin with and one that continues to change with passing time. I found a short history here and a somewhat more detailed one here.
Dialects can make the language difficult to understand even in England - it was hard to follow my grandfather, for instance. When I came to understand that people rarely went further afield than their own villages before the industrial revolution spread everywhere (never mind several world wars) it was less surprising. To a certain extent the differences in how we speak and comprehend nowadays are much less than they once were, but then again, it's the exceptions that keep us interested - like listening carefully to my granddad proved to be.
The history of English is tied to the history of England, of course. Which is an island. And you'd expect an island language to be more insular. But they're fairly close to the continent, so they got invaded a lot. Welsh and Cornish represent what the language of what we call England might have sounded like without the initial Teutonic invasion. Very little of that left, but at least it's nice that those languages still exist on their own (although Cornish is a little dicey.)
When a language dies out it saddens me, even though I wouldn't understand a person speaking it. Because there's a lot more bound up in the language, ways of life, memories that might not get passed on now. Dialect is much the same, although with different dialects of the same language, you and the other person can usually find a way to make yourselves understood. It's a shame that, as far as I know, I never got a chance to hear your grandad speak.
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