Posted on 12/02/2017 9:17:33 AM PST by gaggs
Maybe we are saying the same thing differently. I might not be describing it right. The earliest flat speech that is spoken by regular born here Angelinos (that aren’t Kardashians) has no or few dipthongs in the vowels. Like the word “bag” has a very quickly pronounced, brief, “a” sound as in cat. The twang, like you say, probably did come from all the Midwesterners who migrated west, but if you hear the movie stars of the 1930s in interviews, they all have a little twang, where the word bag would be pronounced with a longer vowel, like “ba-yg.”
The first recorded evidence of Angelinos speaking flatly would be the classic announcer voice (ted Baxter style or gary Owens) used by broadcasters. Now we all talk like that here. (Unless coming from another country or state) (or Bakersfield! Still got some nice twang up there!)
Another example of a flattening of the American accent would be the Limbaugh brothers. Assuming they spoke the same way as kids. Rush went early into broadcasting and clearly flattened his vowels deliberately.
I’ve lived in Southern California since my birth here sixty years ago. I’ve never heard anyone pronounce the word here in any other way besides two syllables. That excludes immigrants from other parts of the country, or another country, which is a large part if not the majority of people living here today.
Sam Yorty, LA's last great mayor, who ran City Hall from 1961 to 1973, pronounced it "los Angle-liss."
Early in the twentieth century, one of the local newspapers tried to get readers to use the Spanish pronounciation for the name of the city, but they didn't have much success.
Dave Gardner once observed that there is a North and South all over the world.
His example was that in northern Germany they say, “danke schoen”, whereas in southern Germany, it’s “donkie shane”. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is true in southern and northern Spain.
In southern Spain they tend to drop some of the consonants and the accent is much different from northern Spaniards and Castilian, which is more precise and “clipped”, like British Oxford English. The southern Spaniards were the ones who settled Latin America, hence the lack of Castilian accents in the New World. Nevertheless, you can still tell if someone is Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican or Argentinean by the way they speak.
Perhaps if you came up with an interesting topic I would read your blog. Till then I guess this one will do.
And Long Beach was called Iowa's seaport. Thousands of Iowa transplants used to attend the annual Iowa By the Sea picnic in Long Beach. Although it attracts much smaller crowds than it did in the mid-twentieth century, the event is now held in LA Harbor on a dock next to the battleship USS Iowa.
Try listening to the epic poem Beowulf spoken in Old English. It sounds epic but I cannot understand a damn word of it. Listening to it it makes me feel like I had a stroke and lost my English, it sounds so familiar like you should understand it but you cannot.
Didja’ ever hear someone from Boston ask a waitress for a fork and knife? Talk about non-rhotic!
How many movie stars of the 1930s were from here? Hepburn was from Connecticut, Clark Gable was from Ohio, Cagney from New York City, and Gary Cooper was from Montana. Leslie Howard and Boris Karloff were British, Errol Flynn was Australian, and Bela Lugosi was Hungarian!
No doubt though that speech patterns have changed throughout the years here, especially since the 1960s. And we haven’t even started on the Valley Girl accent, Wiggers, stoners, and other variations! One thing that really bugged me about the old SNL skit “The Californians” a couple of years ago was that everyone used Valley Speak. The whole deal about the best freeway route was dead on but they really blew it by not including more variations in speech patterns.
You’re an SC fan right?
My late mother really got into geaneaolgy. She found documents in Germany regarding my dad’s side that were in I think some older version of the German language. Someone in Germany translated them into modern German and then my oldest brother translated them into English so she could read them.
LOL, I have tried to read portions of it and failed miserably, so I can’t imagine that it sounds much better.
As I travel around this country I often feel as if I had a stroke and lost my English. The use of an interpreter would not be unwelcome. :)
Help yourself.
Support theft and blogpimping all you wish, and twice on Sunday.
More like Sylvester the Cat: “Congrefs”
The whole blog is a copy/paste of this: http://archive.is/yanRo
Hey, everybody, this is what the blogpimp copy/pasted to his blog then clickbaited to FR courtesy of donated funds. But hey, we can all read it here now. And give the real author a click if we want!
************
Nick Patrick
Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?
Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?
The answer surprised me.
I’d always assumed that Americans used to have British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.
First, let’s be clear: the terms “British accent” and “American accent” are oversimplifications; there were, and still are, many constantly-evolving regional British and American accents. What many Americans think of as “the British accent” is the standardized Received Pronunciation, also known as “BBC English.”
While most American accents are rhotic, the standard British accent is non-rhotic. (Rhotic speakers pronounce the ‘R’ sound in the word “hard”; non-rhotic speakers do not.)
So, what happened?
In 1776, both American accents and British accents were largely rhotic.
It was around this time that non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper class; this “prestige” non-rhotic speech was standardized, and has been spreading in Britain ever since.
Most American accents, however, remained rhotic.
There are a few fascinating exceptions: New York and New England accents became non-rhotic, perhaps because of the region’s British connections. Irish and Scottish accents are still rhotic.
If you’d like to learn more, this passage in The Cambridge History of the English Language is a good place to start.
I’m a Duke grad from Baltimore living and working in Seattle. This is where I share links and thoughts on technology, science, sports, business, and more.
RSS
© 2010 Nick Patrick
Of course
Southerners have closest intact Uk Dialect speak left
Appalachia in pockets really has it
The rest got inundated with non Anglo accents
Eh
Youse guys
Oy
And so on
But keep giving gunner grief, because he’s the bad guy. I hear he parts his hair the wrong way, too!
Rush Limbaugh is of German ancestry from probably 19th century German settlers in Missouri and they rarely picked up the southernized accent. He has a little bit of it and can imitate it to perfection, though, as when he does Clinton.
Most Midwestern big-city accents are strongly influenced by German pronunciation. That’s mainly where the Germans immigrated to.
I was recently in the Arkansas Ozarks and heard a local town councilman speaking with the broadest accent I ever heard; he said ‘whar” for “where” and “thar” and “I was not awar of...” something. Then this other guy came along from the hills of North Carolina and guy # 2 spoke in exactly the same accent. You couldn’t have told them apart. So with that distance between them in terms of miles and area, I am assuming that that was the original way of speaking for what you might call Scots Irish hills people. It had just the slightest tinge of an English rural accent. I found it very interesting.
True. Lived there for most of the 90’s.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.