Did Americans In 1776 Have British Accents?

Common Sense Evaluation ^

[sparklite2]

People who gained maturity and never heard
the works of Brother Dave Gardner miss a twist
that stays in your brain the rest of living.

"Don't take poverty away from poor folks.
Good lord man, it's all they have!"

[sparklite2]

Much like the lyrics to Louie, Louie.

When it first came out, the pearl-clutchers
thought it harbored obscenities so they had
the FBI investigate it. The feds couldn’t
figure out the words, either.

Wiki-—
Ironically, the recording notably includes the drummer yelling “F*ck!” after dropping his drumstick at the 0:54 mark.

[sparklite2]

Clara Bow, the silent film actress, was a phenom until talkies came out. Her Brooklyn accent was so grating audiences couldn’t take it and she faded away.

[sparklite2]

JR must like blog pimps. It seems we are getting more and more of them.

[jmacusa]

Then maybe you can tell me why people who don’t live in my state, New Jersey , think we all pronounce it ‘’Joisey’’. We don’t. If anything people here in The Garden State have no discernible accents. Now go across the Hudson to NYC and there are accents aplenty!

[sparklite2]

What many Americans think of as “the British accent” is the standardized Received Pronunciation, also known as “BBC English.”

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And what is known as the American accent, your ears will tell you, is a Mid-Western variety, used by national broadcasters for the sake of standardization. But, quelle surprise, the notion of a General American Accent, is painted as racist and born of white supremacy.

[MD Expat in PA]

I think it depends on what part of England from which they came. For instance, some of the descendants of the early settlers of the mid Atlantic coastal regions of American still to this day retain a bit of an East Anglian accent due to their isolation, and some say this is the dialect of Shakespeare, but even that has evolved over time. But that is not to say that those of the landed and more educated classes in colonial America sounded like and also depending on what part of England from which they came.

The Americans Who Still Speak with Regional British English Accents

The odd accent of Tangier VA - American Tongues episode #3

Smith Island Accent: Irony with an Elizabethan Twist

Shakespeare: Original pronunciation

[sparklite2]

The difference between a Northern girl and a Southern girl is that a Northern girl says, “You may,” while a Southern girl says, “You ALL may.”

[SoCal Pubbie]

Not quite true. Read my book mentioned above or better yet Runnin Wild by David Stenn. Clara Bow did quite well in talkies although she did have a lot of problems adjusting because she was used to the pantomime style silent acting technique. Her personal issues and ultimate mental illness drive over from Hollywood when she married Rex Bell. However talking pictures destroyed the careers of many silent movie stars. In fact John Wayne‘s first big break in the movie The Big Trail in 1930 came about because first choices like Gary Cooper were unavailable, and other silent cowboy stars did not have voices suitable for talkies.

[SoCal Pubbie]

I should also add, before somebody else goes there, that the old stories of Clara Bow having orgies with the USC football team are not true either. I used Stenn’s book extensively in researching mine, and he shows pretty conclusively that those allegations were made up by Daisy DeVoe, Bow’s former assistant who was locked in a scandalous court case after being accused of embezzling Bow’s funds.

[sparklite2]

The English spoken in “Deadwood,” loquacious and erudite, is almost Shakespearean. Executive Producer David Milch (the former English Lit lecturer at Yale who created NYPD Blue} did a lot of research on the matter and said the profanity is dense but more like the actual language used than what westerns sited in North Dakota produce.

[sparklite2]

. If anything people here in The Garden State have no discernible accents.

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You think that’s similar to why a fish is unaware of the water around him. Moving from Texas to Georgia was a pleasantry of accents. Moving from Georgia to New Jersey was every stereotype I ever heard about the New Jersey accent made manifest. Unable to understand half of it for a while, I finally adapted to what I think may be the ugliest accent in the country. No offense intended. ;)

[sparklite2]

I am a student of the twenties, but your book may be a little too tightly focused, as football rivalries don’t interest me. The stuff I like appears in books like...

Only Yesterday
Since Yesterday
The Shadow of Blooming Grove
The Ohio Gang
The President’s Daughter...

and of course all the works of Sinclair Lewis.

[sparklite2]

It’s my understanding that Bow’s fascination with the football players extended to throwing parties with them and hanging out to the extent that her father tried to get her to knock it off.

[reed13k]

interesting about the r in Washington. Grew un in SW Indiana and everyone there does that. If I’m home long enough or have had too much to drink I start to do it again.

[SoCal Pubbie]

That’s why I recommended the other book, which is a complete biography of Clara Bow. While my book does focus on football, one of the major points is that the rivalry was a product of 1920s, which was the beginning of modern America. I include many things outside of football, including Hollywood celebrities like Bow, John Wayne and Will Rogers, the role of Catholics in America and their struggles with the KKK, the Klan taking over the state government in Indiana and the fall of that group as a power in the country, monsters like Al Capone and prohibition,, etc.

I’ve always found the Roaring Twenties a fascinating period, and when you look at what’s going on today compared to those times, you’ll see that all the main issues are exactly the same.

[lizma2]

“Appalachia in pockets really has it”

Read years ago that when they were first putting in phone lines the workers came across isolated areas in Appalachia where they spoke Elizabethan English.

Found this interesting

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224/in-what-ways-is-appalachian-speech-closer-to-elizabethan-english-than-contempora

[RegulatorCountry]

The island is in North Carolina. Ocracoke in particular and Hyde County in general. “Hoid Coontie” in the local dialect. It’s known in the NC vernacular as a “hoi-toider” accent, some other areas of the NC coast have it as well, with even a very few isolated pockets in the Tidewater and Chesapeake Bay of Virginia. “Hoi-toider” is high tider.

[sparklite2]

I’m pretty sure I read Bow’s biography. Another good one is the biography of Jean Harlow. And for a good dose of cynicism, the story of Aimee Semple-McPherson.

[MD Expat in PA]

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.

Old English, the language spoken at the time that Beowulf was written is more akin to old western German and Viking Scandinavian languages than to what we think of as English today. It was the language of the Anglo Saxons who were from the Germanic tribes who invaded Brittan and supplanted the Celtic and Celtic/Roman cultures. And Beowulf, while we think of it as the earliest of English literature, it was a poem is set in Scandinavia. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes

English has changed over time due to many influences and subsequent invading cultures including the Normans who were the French speaking decedents of earlier Viking invaders and also the influence of Latin, the language of the church and of administration, the legal language that still permeates today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English

The Christmas Story in Old English – Luke Ch. 2 in Anglo-Saxon

While it sounds very foreign to us today, you can still pick out some words here and that we still use in modern English – “and” and “him” and "is" and "after" and "man".