Why American English is Highly Misunderstood
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 พ.ค. 2024
- After spending the last year discussing British and American word origins on my TH-cam Shorts, it's time to come clean: American English is highly misunderstood. Watch the video to find out why.
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To quote my grandmother "The British pronounce words 'properly'. The Americans pronounce words 'correctly'."
Where's she from?
@@thematthew761
Holland
Ah@@GaryBirdmin
@@GaryBirdmin The actual province of Holland? Or somewhere else in the Netherlands?
@@sammiller6631 I don't know. She passed when I was still in grade school. My mother always said that grandma is from 'Holland'. As far as I know I could be Holland Iowa.
I was once ridiculed in a bar for saying “Peter” in all its rotic glory. One of the the British lads said, “I can’t believe you pronounce it “Peterrrrrrr.” He then added “What gives you the idear it sounds acceptable?”
I answered, “I reckon I prefer to keep my ‘R’s where they are instead of donating them to words that don’t have any, like “idearrrrrr”.
The English don't pronounce "T"s either. That's why they pronounce "bottle" as "bah-oh".
They also had the fad of pronouncing "R" as "W"..Like Elmer Fudd.
Well, that should have started a nice fist fight LOL.
@@RRaquello I can imagine that one, but I think the more common Brit pronunciation would emphasize the t's. In the US we tend to turn them into d's, at least I do. Eg: butter is pronounced more like budder (by most everyone I know), while a Brit would likely bear down on the t's, but turn the r into a schwa.
@@RRaquello"Bo'oh o' wa'ah?"
I remember my English and Linguistics professor telling us "If you ever want to piss off a British person talking shit about your dialect then just tell them American English is older than British English" and dear god has that created some meltdowns talking to people
I'm from Phoenix and studied in London in grad school. When I told my professors and other coeds that American English was in fact closer to the more ancestral form of English, they were in utter denial of it.
I know British English is older because I watch US movies about the Romans, and they all had British accents!
Languages are evolving all the time, so it's basically nonsense in both directions.
@@mickistevens4886 Just watch Life of Brian, even the Jews spoke English 😁
@@Wasserkaktus I think it's only a specific dialect in the south-- not the whole of the country-- that is closer to "the Queen's English" than modern British English. My friend got a masters in linguistics and she used to like to pull that factoid out from time to time.
When I lived in England, I got so good picking out accents that I told one guy that he clearly hadn't grown up in the area. He proudly pointed out a community he was from -- it was maybe six miles away on the other side of Dewsbury which we could see from the hilltop we were standing on.
Sounds like you were near me.😂 I'm pretty sure that this is one of the most divided areas in terms of accent. From where I am, the area I can see has four distinct accents. One of them REALLY distinct and all marvellous
I used to drink with mates outside of Derby, and they told me about regional variations of slang that were limited to areas of just a few mile.
My DNA analysis says I'm 58% British. When born, I found myself in the Idaho/Wyoming/Utah area. I ended up speaking a heavily rhotic version of English with a few glottal stops in words like " mo-un", meaning "mountain".
The best way ive ever heard the construction of English as a language was simply this. "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
haha, thats great
The original is from James Nicoll. With the typo corrected:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
This made me laugh for a solid minute because I know history
Will tell you that 50% of English is still English its the other 50% that is odd, fun fact all non foreign influence words follow the laws of Grammer and spalling *spelling* didn't even notice that it was misspelled
Personally I prefer the wording from the commonly shared tumblr quote
“Because English beats up other languages in dark alleys, then rifles through their pockets for loose
grammar and spare vocabulary.”
To know that 'belittle' is an American word makes me appreciate 'embiggen' all that much more
Oh, and then there's the recent hilarious addition of "bigly." And one would have to have been hiding under a rock or out living like a hermit somewhere not to know where that "gem" came from. 😂😂
_Bigly_ dates back to the early 14th century.
"could of fooled me"
-americans
@sunderzilla
That one makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
To be fair, when _could've_ is spoken, it does sound like "could of" which means many of my countrymen don't understand grammar and can't write properly.
@@THall-vi8cp I'm sorry I meant no offence in that whatsoever
I just find it funny that it's so prevalent among americans.
I love the part about dialects. I grew up in Virginia speaking in Virginia Piedmont, with a mother who spoke High Tide (or as we called it, Tidewater English) and a father who spoke Southern Highland Appalachian. And my parents both grew up in the same state in which I was raised. A lot of folks from other areas of the US and abroad consider "Southern" to be a single regional dialect. The true situation on the ground is so much richer and stranger than that.
That coastal dialect from Maryland to Georgia is now recognized as the closest remnant of Elizabethan English existing, including in Britain.
I grew up in Wisconsin until age 12, when we moved out to Washington state...and I discovered that not everyone calls a water fountain a "bubbler." There were even more revelations when I joined the Army...I had drill sergeants I could not understand at all. I gained a lot of physical fitness from that fact.
Yeah "Southern" is more a grouping of similar dialects rather than a single monolithic dialect. I love the way the Piedmont dialects sound.
@shepberryhill4912 funny enough, New Zealanders say the exact same thing about their own speech. Nobody would mistake that for the Coastal Mid-Atlantic dialect - but it supposedly has to do with the way they pronounce the 'i' in fish or kid, which is an odd-sounding and rare little morpheme.
@njhoepner - I grew up in Boston and still call it a bubbler. I live in Australia now, and have yet to say it without having to launch into a lengthy explanation.
There is a very good video on YT that where one guy does many of the dialects in the USA. Great watch / listen!
the reason the folks from the Upper Midwest have supposedly no "accent" is because of all the Germans, Scands and Poles..however they use words that are definitely not English...
I made this argument against a highschool english teacher who would pronounce the H in herbalism, he cited the oxford dictionary and i countered with its french origin and the merriam websters dictionary. Each of the seperate dictionaries have different pronunciations of the word and its one of the many interesting points on how communication has canged.
That's really funny because dictionaries often add words each year so they can update their copyright on the way definitions are phrased. It's why the Oxford dictionary added "bootylicious."
Amaricans saying 'erb' is so annoying and ridiculous. Like just about every pronunciation is dogmatically phonetic out of sheer literalism and convenenince but yet you decide to pseudo acknowledge the connections to French in this one word?!
@@ukbloke28 There's just something very linguistically strained in pronouncing both the /h/ and the /r/, bringing it all forward to the /b/. It's like a wave rolling through your whole mouth
@@ServantOfPuppets yes, we know American culture tends towards the lazy. As my dad always used to say, American food is like baby food - too sweet and too soft. This is the linguistic equivalent.
@@ukbloke28 phonetic ease of pronunciation is a natural factor in language change across the globe but go off i guess
anyway "herb" really did originate in English from Old French "erbe", which itself dropped the H from Latin "herba". English later re-added the H orthographically to connect it to the Latin word
Brits saying 'herb' is so annoying and ridiculous. Like just about every pronunciation is guided by a word's history out of sheer convenience to the many influences on English but yet you randomly decide to pronounce some letters literally?
I don’t know if it holds true today but I was taught that English was a living, breathing language that adapts easily. We were taught to be proud of our common language.
@teresabillings8378 I remember being taught that an unusual facet of English - or maybe better said, English speakers - is the willingness to freely adopt words from other languages.
It's absolutely true. Moreso than most of the European languages, it has absorbed and crossed many empires and cultures and other languages.
I saw on the internet, so it must be true: English will follow another language into a dark alley, bop them on the head, and go through their pockets looking for more spare words.
@@DaisyCloverbee😅😅
@@cancermcaids7688 Maybe not. According to an article in the Boston Globe from 2014, 42% of modern English is loan words. But that was 10 years ago; maybe Japanese has caught up. :-) The same article also says English is now the world's biggest source of load words. The evolution of language is a cool subject.
In line with the whole "America changing things based on the word's origin" I had a British friend who would try to call me out on the American spellings of things like color, armor, and other words that the Brits add a U into. I knew it was a word originating from Latin and that Latin didn't use the U. So I got to researching why the Brits add it, I found it was part of the French rule of England in the 1300s where they mixed a lot of French into English as it was used in royal court and other official settings. When America went independent Noah Webster took on a life long mission of making the American Dictionary to standardize language within the new nation and part of that was reverting some words back to their origins. The next time after I learned this that my friend tried to mess with me telling me I was spelling words wrong I informed him that in fact he was the one spelling things "wrong" and when I told him he was using French spellings he had a mini meltdown (he hated the French.)
Then again the o and ou in colour and armour sound like an a and in some cases the last r dissapears completely from pronounciation , also one funny thing for you who likes Latin :Aeroplane,Aeternal.
I've also gotten to the point where I'll sometimes call British spellings of things the "French spellings."
"And we all know how much you Brits like the French. :P"
Living in Canada, there is no consistency between the English and French spellings. I'll sometimes not even notice which I'm using, or I might intentionally switch mid-message just to mess with people.
I get particular fun in teasing the brits about that inserted U whenever they get uppity. Pronounce it the way that it's spelled and they shut up real quick.
That'll show them brits
@@kennyholmes5196I could say the same thing about color. It isn't pronounced 'col-OR' but that's what it looks like to me when I read it. We all shouldn't engage in this bs, it's so trivial. There's no wrong way. Just different ways
My dad talks about meeting a man in the Virginia mountains when he immigrated to the USA from England in the 60’s. He assumed the man was also from England. The whole mountain town had a British accent.
My husband and I enjoyed the PBS series, "The Story Of English", and bought the companion book by Robert McCrum. Truly fascinating.
We enjoy your take on living in the U.S.
Sometimes British people in TH-cam comments (usually not these comments) will act as though current Americans are the ones that changed the language. And I’m always like, I learned to talk like this as a baby, just like you did
If Americans changed the English language, then so have all others that speak a different dialect of their language, which is the entire world.
I once worked (I'm from the US) with a group of folks from the UK and they were blaming me for the incorrect "state" of US English.
An absolute shame that back then I wasn't watching Lost in the pond.
The British superiority complex is strong.
Innit?@@LillibitOfHere
@@Blondie42 Had that conversation a few times, too... I like retorting a big thanks for their confidence as if I could actually be responsible for hopelessly mangling the natural tongue of about 2/3 of a continent single handedly... AND then I threaten to take up residence in THEIR neighborhoods to see how far I can thoroughly force my linguistic influence JUST to mess their lives up even worse... haha ;o)
A writer in the Daily Telegraph wrote about "insupportable Americanisms like 'gotten'" and I almost wrote to him (this was before X) "America has undoubtedly inflicted many barbarisms upon the English language, but GOTTEN ISN'T ONE OF THEM! Or have you... forgotten?"
Gotten vanished in England after the settlers moved west - and they kept it.
Or "funnily" what the heck is even that
@@paddington1670many Americans hate "funnily" too.
@@paddington1670 If I can't say "Funnily" what on earth am I supposed to use as the adverb form of "Funny"? I can't say "He pronounced that funny", It just sounds wrong, "He pronounced that funnily" sounds way better.
You can still call it Twitter. "X" is just harder to comprehend as a proper noun in text.
Born and raised Bostonian here. We don't pronounce our Rs. When my nephew was little in speech therapy after suffering hearing loss he got very frustrated with the speech therapist who kept trying to get him to pronounce a hard R. I had to tell her, he's got my Boston accent and he's pronouncing Rs correctly.
Yeah, Boston is non-rhotic but also transposes Rs sometimes. I didn't have hard non-rhoticity growing up (even though I was raised near Worcester/Wista) but I did take some of those conserved Rs and dump them into words they didn't belong (which happens in British dialects as well) - farther (as in Dad) and aurnt for example.
Honestly how people can think a language is being 'ruined' by another version of the language, that is insane. How do they think languages formed? Grunts and hand gestures started it, and we just evolved our language over and over in many ways. This is a fairly natural evolution of societal norms.
Yeah, as long as we understand each other clearly, it shouldn’t matter.
Everything came about through ruination
Go to the American south and you may find you don’t understand anything being said - not a thing. Then you may change your opinion.
@@Drummer8282As a Yank, I can literally say the same thing about the West Country accent. I can’t understand half of what they are saying. It doesn’t mean that they ruined English.
Love the saying attributed to Sir Winston Churchill " Britain and the US, two countries separated by a common language"
It was George Bernard Shaw
@@sillypuppy5940 It must be, for all quotes in the English language are eventually attributed to either Churchill or George Bernard Shaw.
@@ahorsewithnoname773 If you don't read the TH-cam comment section you are uninformed. If you do read the TH-cam comment section you are misinformed. ---- Mark Twain
@@ZER0ZER0SE7EN aaand now I believe that Mark Twain wrote about TH-cam. Thank you very much!
My favorite explanation of dialects and regional accents:
Rose Tyler: “If you are an alien how come you sound like you're from the North?”
The Doctor: “Lots of planets have a North!”
Still, so many Brits just won’t come off it.
And they all want independence...
Classic British humor. It gets me everytime!
growing up in New Orleans and environs, one expects the Creole and Cajun accents ... but running into the Third Ward or Irish Channel was just ... boil is berl, oil is erl, etc. Next door neighbor grew up in the portion of the city and listening to her talk when I was a kid was just ... fascinating. Of course, everyone asked where I was from as my Mom was from Indiana and my Dad from Virginia and we moved so much in my first ten years ... I not sure I have a regional accent ...
The retort given for Thomas Jefferson's word "belittle" actually serves as the very definition
Literally, its in the name!! haha
Bless James D Nicoll for his oft mangled quote. “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
One such modern addition is "Emoji" which if you asked any rando the etymology, they'd probably say it's derived from "Emoticon" when it's actually a loan word from Japanese that just happens to sound like emoticon.
anglish or bust
That is hilarious. I'm stealing that.
i was too. i thought Terry Pratchett said it, but no@@FalconAndTrident
@@catherinewolfe3740Emoji is a perfect example of English just stealing words rather than translating them. "Emoji" literally translates as "picture character", because that's what they are: pictures encoded as characters. There are already several words in English suitable for this, like "pictogram". (Even though "pictogram" isn't English either. It's an unholy fusion of a Latin word with a Greek word.)
I've sat through international business meetings with Brits, Americans, Germans, Japanese, Thais, etc. We all spoke English, because it was the only language we all shared.
And we all understood each other, except the Brits and Yanks, who sometimes descended into idiomatic language that confused the rest. The odd thing was that the Brits and Yanks generally understood each other's idioms, even when they were different.
E.g., Americans could figure out "Bob's your uncle" and Brits "screwed the pooch", but hardly anyone else could.
I part of it is the fact that Brits and Americans consume each other's media. We may not actually use certain phrases ourselves; but, we hear them often enough to have some familiarity.
I lived in Japan and we would go to the local bank to pay our utility bills, etc. This poor Japanese girl could not understand what the British girl was saying. I actually stepped in and 'translated' for them.
Hm, I'd never figure out such idioms. Sounds idiotic to me. I'm American
Those are both very standard idioms, if a bit outdated. You might be quite young if you've never heard those. But I would hope, with context, you could figure them out.
@@Ayverie4But if you were a Thai who'd learned English as a second language?
I like to watch BBC movies (no captions available) and was confused by references to a clock as if it were a person, until I realized they meant clerk.
I loved your video on Mourning Doves. Thanks, it was fun. 😊
As the old joke... English isn't a language. It's three other languages disguised in a trenchcoat.
I like this! And I think it's very accurate. 😁
Hold the phones!
Hold the phones!
We have a winner!
You get a 🏆 for the funniest comment. Thank you! 😂
English is the result of melting French, German and Latin together, dropping it on the floor before it’s solid, and picking up bits of other languages as you try to scoop it off the floor.
sorry to be an”erm actually” kinda guy but like that’s literally every language. Every language is other just a combinations or dialect of another language
@@smallguyysorry but I'm going to "erm actually" you, since English is particularly adept at collecting other language words and playing loose. Ask anyone who grew up speaking a romance language. They all complain that it doesn't follow any pattern and it's inconsistent precisely because it's a mishmash of languages
If you can get past value judgments, linguistics is fascinating. I love that all those dialects exist.
It's funny how they carry. I have had people guess I am from further north than I really am, as I drop my Rs a lot and sound more like a "no'the'n" Pennsylvanian than from where I was born and raised, which is in the Amish Country! I have no idea how I picked up this accent.
Since English doesn’t use accent marks to the extent that some European languages do; as a result certain English words are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently depending on their usage.
EXAMPLES:
LIVE-
I live in this house.
NBC is doing a live broadcasting of the show.
CONTENT-
Have you seen the contents of this box?
Are you content with your new puppy?
WOUND-
I wound up the old clock yesterday.
I have a wound on my leg.
WIND-
The wind is blowing hard.
I’ll wind up that toy for you.
PRESENT-
Thank you for the present.
I will present the gift to him.
MINUTE-
Now wait just a minute.
That matter is a minute issue.
I wished you'd used "present" instead of "gift to blow people's minds. 😆
I first ran into that type of difference back in grade school. The word was "minute" in one context it's mi-nute and in the other, it's min-ute.
My dyslexic-self struggled trying to find the past tense of "read" until I realized it's spelled the same way not matter the tense.
People always hear old English writings and say “wow, everyone back then spoke so eloquently.” But 1) it was quite a privilege to know how to read and write, and 2) in my opinion, how we write today being less formal is more indicative of the language developing and becoming more accessible, not that we are somehow stupider these days. The gap between the highly learned and the common person is much slimmer now, which is clearly not a bad thing.
"Stupider" is not a real word.
@@marktrail8624 Yes they are according to Merriam-Webster. Basic research will answer that, so get off your high horse.
Remember, the chemist who first named the element Aluminum originally called it Alumium, but then later settled on Aluminum. It was a completely different person who decided to call it Aluminium. The Americanism of calling the 13th element 'aluminum' that many Brits lambast, was started by a British man. The first to name the element even.
also it was following the logic/pattern of platinum
Just to try to make it sound Latin man they make changes for such odd reasons
It wasn't even a chemist that suggested the change, it was a letter to the editor of a political-literary magazine.
Good to know the British have always been this way
Damn I had no idea about that. Thanks for the info. It's rare to learn something from a TH-cam comment.
Language elitism is weird. The existence of (almost) every modern language is a testament against it - imagine speaking Middle to Modern English to a pre-Norman Englishman, or Brazilian Portuguese to a man from old Rome.
The thing is, I know for a fact that the Roman would likely pick up on the fact that he was listening to a descendant of the Latin Vulgate if he was well educated enough and it would piss him off that the Vulgate was acceptable. So, while language elitism doesn't really make sense, it's also nothing new.
@@timothystamm3200great point, one note though, the Vulgate is the early latin translation of the bible, the low version of Latin is called Vulgar Latin
It’s all about control
Except brazilian Portuguese isn't a language. And neither is American English. Its Portuguese and English spoken with different accents.
It also depends if it was written or spoken. Written Portuguese is way closer to vulgar Latin than its spoken form
6:20 love the British bicycle helmet labeled "nutcase!"
All of your videos are fascinating. This one in particular. Would love to see more on your observations and research on the South vs. England. And I can hear many varieties of British accents as well.
I lived in Britain for a couple of years and tried to take all of the grief I got for my accent in stride, but didn't take it terribly well when a woman berated me over using the past participle "gotten" as if it were some ugly thing we invented rather than the British dropped it.
They are only trying to help you. As a UK person I would assume anyone saying “gotten” is not very intelligent and rather slow. It is just “got”.
@@jamessmithson-br7rmFascinating - I’ve heard the word ‘gotten’ used by BBC newsreaders and correspondents. Perhaps they didn’t receive your silly memo.
"Gotten" comes from Yorkshire. I'm an American and my British/Australian mum could not help but comment on it frequently.
@@jamessmithson-br7rmor they could choose not to be rude and keep to themselves? Thats never hurt anyone
@@jamessmithson-br7rm it's silly to assume one's intelligence just by the way someone speaks.
We even get blamed for natural linguistic changes, somehow not surprised we get hate for something we have no control over
it's cool to hate americans for whatever reason
The northerners hatin to they destroying the southern accent
They forget that we are literally called a “melting pot”.
People love hating on other people for stupid reasons. That's nothing new.
Don't worry though you'll still be called the asshole even though most Americans don't care or enjoy the differences. Heaven forbid we make fun of beans on toast that's just too far. I've seriously seen Brits give us shit for that.
Great stuff! These weee common topics when I taught English at Chinese universities 99-2006. My Intercultural and TESOL degrees had great phonetic classes, but I had to dig deep back then to truly inform my students about all of our regional dialects.
So glad you got to highlight the Okracoke Brogue! Fun fact, areas of the NC coastal plains had publications and church services in Scottish Gaelic well into the late 19th century! There are all sorts of fun linguistic pockets in the US.
My grandma grew up bilingual here in Texas! English and... German. In fact, there are people alive who were born and raised here speaking only German! I'm sure my lexicon has several pidgin German words...
I love how painful the "marry-mary-merry" bit was for you. I, a Californian, recall being in a college class. My professor was from New York City. He wrote those three words on the board, and of course we all said them as homophones. He then proudly pronounced them completely distinctly in that unmistakable Bronx accent.
Funny enough, I was raised (and spent most of my life in) the Bronx yet I also pronounce all three words as homophones. Although I think my accent was influenced more from TV and school growing up than the people around me
To me a metro New Yorker it seems that one of the primary features of NY English is resistance to vowel mergers. I have no marry-merry-Mary, hurry-furry, or cot-caught mergers. To Brits reading being a non cot-caught merged North American also means I have the LOT-CLOTH split like the queen did and the Irish do, similar to the TRAP-BATH split; loss rhymes with Sauce, gone rhymes with lawn not con. Hence coffee as cawfee. Often and Orphan are homophones in non-rhotic New York accents.
Some New Yorkers even lack the father-bother merger, which in North America is only also found in Boston/New Hampshire/Maine!
My speech has a lot of those mergers, though I'm not sure about some of the obscure ones mentioned. However, I do distinguish which and witch, although I believe most Americans do not.
Sooo.... serious question: how else are you supposed to pronounce them? I can *kinda* see how marry and merry could be further distinguished but how could "marry" and "marry" sound different?
@@ErekLich It's merry, marry, and the name Mary. I can't answer how because I don't distinguish them myself.
The most interesting thing here is how they tried to mock the word "belittle" by actually giving the word meaning in action and context. In other words, they defined it excellently.
And from the perspective of someone who is neither British nor American who also has experienced the American accent via native speakers outside of the US and living in the Midwest for almost a decade, it is interesting to see how English has changed over the years. There are also plenty of Americanisms that Brits used recently without question, like the word "truck" has now overtaken "lorry" (and official British word for that is "HGV") and everybody now "gives it gas" to make the car goes faster.
Perhaps another thing to touch on is "football" vs "soccer." Brits argue that "football" is the only correct way to say it but British immigrants to American who came over decades ago said that "football" and "soccer" were used interchangeably. And of course, America uses it to easier differentiate it from American football. Canadians, too, who have their own version of gridiron football.
soccer is a british word short for association as in association football then used by americans like you said to disguish american football and soccer also canada like you said and australia there is australian football, not rugby nor soccer
I was going to say, they belittled old TJ for making up the word belittle. That's like scoring a goal on yourself to spite the other team.
The Brits invented the term soccer then moved on when the poors started using and playing soccer ( used to be a private school game ) so then the rich people called it football.
@@adamk.7177 lmao! true
European Magazine and London Review accidentally mansplaining Jefferson's word to him.
I think it's endlessly interesting how language is a constantly changing and evolving construct.
In my opinion, if language has been used to convey meaning it has been used correctly, regardless of any so called "rules."
Ah yes. So "deez popo luh deez nuts" is perfectly wonderful. All use of language conveys meaning. The issue is a devolution of clarity and specificity. In the case of American Gen-Z it couldn't be much worse. For example, they've started calling Millennials "boomers", because to their borderline-illiterate minds, "boomer" means someone older than them. It is still conveying "meaning", but in a dumbed-down and vague, and ultimately incorrect way. Bastardization is not evolution.
When I was stationed in Greece I had a British girlfriend. I visited her twice for a couple weeks. All of her friends were giving me a hard time about American English, and as an American, it couldn't be US that was wrong! (I gave them the American they expected and enjoyed.) I told them that we took English to America hundreds of years ago and kept it pristine while England had screwed it up in the meantime. We all had a good laugh. Fast forward over a decade later and I was watching Melvyn Bragg's excellent "The Adventure of English" and... you guessed it... I WAS RIGHT!!! 🤣Not in all cases of course but it certainly is the majority of the difference. Americans were obsessed with maintaining proper English.
A lot of it had to do with most Americans only having the King James Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress to read...
They were, but not for intellectual or moral high-ground reasons, rather purely for sentimental ones. Or possibly, in some cases, religious/fanatic ones. It's common in emigrated or displaced groups to retain the original version of their language, food and cultural traits, etc.
@@seanmegan1278 I don't know if wanting to maintain pronunciation pristine is intellectually or morally superior. Some might argue it isn't. But it's what Noah Webster and many Americans wanted. Look up "The American Spelling Book". I believe they actually had copies of it in the school when I grew up. It had all the words spelled out phonetically, a rather new concept I believe. And you really can't compare immigrants into a functioning society with Englishmen showing up in America. They WERE the society. Going native wasn't really a thing. They had nothing to protect their culture from. They really did just want all Americans to speak well. I appreciate your well thought out reply.
you are always right
@@johnl5316 Are you picking on me?!! Or have you somehow divined my immense intelligence? (I wouldn't say ALWAYS right.)
A most amazing thing about American English is that a cafeteria in the US and one in Denmark sound _precisely_ the same en masse even tho there are no shared words at all.
I wouldn't be so confident of the "at all" bit, both are germanic languages and so will inevitably share at least a few words.
Pretty sure both languages have the word "pasta", and that's not Germanic at all.
I’m often struck by how many Scandinavians prefer speaking in a North American accent when they speak English. I think English has a similar sort of sing-song rhythm to Danish (and Dutch and Frisian too). I was listening to spoken Norwegian for the first time recently and was amazed at how Scottish it sounded. I couldn’t understand any words but still the general cadence sounded unmistakably Scottish to me.
I wanna live in denmark forever with a danish bf
There are actually quite a few words that are linguistically related but they are not super obvious, you have to dig deep to see the connections
I once heard someone claim that there was and could never be a true "king's english" because of the profusion of established dialects, the continuous trait of english to adopt or incorporate words from languages it comes into contact with (such as the french and latin you mentioned), however, in American english parlance, spanish is typically the source language for many of our newest and most enjoyed words (especially relating to ranching and livestock work), and a general disinterest in nailing down a specific dialect to construct a specific set of grammar and syntax rules. This person also argued that the failure to create strictures and a strictly refined "proper" english is one of the reasons that aided in its spread and adoption as a trade language, something to which i somewhat agree, although discounting the role of military force behind britain's empire and americas expanding influence in the creation of the modern global trade system would be disingenuous.
On the subject of dialects, it never fails to amaze me that the British think there's only one southern accent. And they think that that southern accent sounds exactly like Vivien Leigh in "Gone with the Wind". But she was British and had never even been to the south at that point in time in her life. There's not a single southerner that sounds a damn thing like her. Nor do we sound like Daniel Craig's character in Knives Out, since he was imitating an accent which actually belongs to the early 20th century and is very very rarely heard now. Unless you're in a nursing home in Mississippi.
Totally wrong there. I’d say a good percentage of the population have never even seen the film or could tell you who Vivien Leigh was. It was made in 1940! More of us would think Dukes of Hazzard or Forest Gump! 🤣
The accent Craig uses in Knives Out sounds like someone who grew up with a thick Cajun accent and then went to college where they refined it by adding more French influence to avoid ridicule.
@@fakjbf3129 Nope, he's imitating Shelby Foote, a very well known southern writer and southern historian who was prominently displayed in Ken Burns the Civil War. He actually even said his much when interviewed about the accent.
I am equally suprised that Americans think there is only one Australian accent. I grew up with strong RP influence. The okka, "crocodile dundee" accent sounds almost foreign. American actors who try to speak in Australian accents are near unintelligible.
On the other hand Hong Kong english accent sounds neutral to me.
American English is closer to Elizabethan English because the English settlers who came to North America were isolated. They were in small communities, where language changes slowly. Back in England, there were large cities where new trends and fashions -- and language -- spread rapidly.
The same thing can be seen in Japanese dialects in emigrant Japanese communities in Los Angeles and in South America. The Japanese Rafu Shimpo newspaper has been published in Los Angeles since 1903. Until a few decades ago it still used the old pre-WWII orthography and characters, and it read like something from the early 20th century.
In short, emigrants who go in small numbers to isolated communities tend to preserve older dialects.
Most of the females in the early English colonies were named Elizabeth, actually.
Same here in Hawaii. The Japanese words and characters are rarely used in Japan today.
Yep. I've seen that the English only started dropping the 'r' during the industrial revolution.
too busy in factories to pronounce the R@@jayc1139
Similar to food, too. I remember seeing an article about a layered cake from I think Sweden(?), which has since morphed into something else in Sweden, but in Canada descendants of Swedish immigrants still make it the old-fashioned way.
Thanks. Laurence, for this fascinating, and often hilarious, episode!! Your gift of understatement is not lost on me.
Chuck in Northern New England
I enjoyed this video and the comments. So fascinating!!
When I read British books from a century or so ago, they mocked the “American” words “fun”, “note-paper”, “mirror” and “weekend”, among many others, or considered them low-class. I don’t think anyone in UK now would think twice of saying any of these. The recommended, more British and upper class recommendations were: pleasant/delightful, looking glass, writing-paper, and Saturday to Mondays, they even tried Sats-to-Mons, good luck with that one, respectively, which all sound stilted or cumbersome nowadays.
As Maggie Smith (as the Dowager) asked, "What's a "weak end"?"
delightful still is a good substitute imo, otherwise yes
British people don't use notepaper though?
They make fun of us for describing things with words while they do the same thing to try to act fancy
Bless their little hearts. 😘
As an American w/ a linguistics degree living in the UK, THANK YOU 🙏. Wish I could teleport all this info into every the head of every Brit who is critical of American English, but alas, I usually just roll my eyes & move along as further explanation about why they’re wrong seems to embolden them 😅
It’s the curse of the linguist to wince every time somebody criticizes another dialect or slang as “bad English.”
I’m an American and my 22 year old tour guide in London this Summer unquestionably believed my English was wrong. I was quite taken aback at her ignorance and stupidity. She was supposedly college educated. 🤦♂️
@@VoiceOverTrailReviews you colonial upstarts should've known better.
England is still coming to grips with the fact that it is a has-been country.
@@tatianapreobrazhenskaya9777 should of*
I love your enunciation, a pleasure to listen to all those interesting facts. Great video, thank you!
Mr.Pond. I love your videos and have watched them for years. I would love for you to do perhaps one long form video, out of character and on a more serious note, about English-English and its dialects, and US English and all the differences and basically elaborate on much of what you fly over in these videos. I know a thesis or book could be written about it, but I often find that I want to know more about the things you say. Just my thoughts. Thanks! PS- I smashed that like but now, three years ago... now. so that must be good for something.
I had a communications professor who suggested that American pronunciations in major immigration areas (NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Etc) kept changing with each wave of new citizens. But those who moved inland to more isolated areas, took their accents with them and those accents did not change much. She also said that the advent of Radio and TV changed the way accents were perceived and modified.
Yes, this is so true. When I was young, I visited my relatives (great grandma, uncles) in Eastern Kentucky who called the 'trunk' of a car the 'boot end'. They also called a 'bag' a 'poke' and older styles of English were used as well. I wished I could've recorded them speaking, so I could get their speech patterns, but I was just a kid. Hindsight.
I'm from the upper Midwest, but don't have the accent now. If people ask, I tell them I speak Disney as I watched a lot of those programs on TV as a child.
Oh, the upper Midwest has an accent and I thought for a long time that I didn't either, but I can pick out a Northern Midwest accent now faster than others lol. This isn't meant to be rude at all, my mom would always say we spoke flat English and don't have accents (we are actually almost in the geographic middle of the country, but I still can hear more of the northern Midwest accent versus going a state below us). I didn't think I ope, I definitely ope and it's a very northern thing that's almost involuntary so I didn't even realize how much I do say it. It's just one of those things, certain pronunciations give it away no matter how much you thing you don't have an accent.
@@nedludd7622Excellent “come back”…Ned!! ❤️🇺🇸❤️
When I was a doctor on a reservation, the elders would tell me how in the 1930’s, the Progressives would try to force them to drop their native language for English. They failed. Since then TV and radio have so extinguished the old language that it now has to be taught as a second language.
I think a lot of people miss the fact that a “season” of television is often literal. It’s typically up to 13 episodes. If those are released weekly then it takes a full season to release.
@@troybaxter Common misconception. Cours are tv programming that correspond to the seasons. In anime, season usually refers to a grouping of episodes often based on continuous airing or production, and seasons are often planned to be a certain amount of cours long. So, a 36 episode show that aired over the course of 9 months could have 3 cours and 1 season, or you could have a show without any correspondence to real world seasons that is still called season 1.
Flip side is shows that run over the course of years and have one season per year telling a serialised story over the length of that year with upwards of 40-50 weekly episodes, like Star Trek, Power Rangers (currently 22 ep/season, first season lasted for 60 weekly episodes when only 40 were originally planned, sat at about 32 episodes/season during the Disney Era), NCIS...
That's not counting effing soap operas that run up to 5 episodes per-week across a 50-week year, like "Home & Away" or "Neighbours" (both Aussie) or "The Bold And The Beautiful", or game shows that do a similar 5-a-week/50-week-a-year 'season'.
@@Corbal975that is specifically a term used around Japanese TV production, it is not used with in the industry more broadly
@@corvacopia the comment I was replying to was specifically about anime
You could also think of a TV season as referring to the fact that American TV has historically had one portion of the year for airing new episodes (interspersed with some reruns too), and another portion of the year for airing only reruns (typically summer). In that sense, you could think of a television year as being composed of "new episode season" and "rerun season."
This was fascinating. Thank you!
I'm American, but my oldest known ancestor was born on Silsden Moor, Kildwick, Yorkshire in 1499. I'd love to know how he talked. BTW, his grandson Christopher died in Maryland a year after the Ark and the Dove landed on what is now St. Clements Island. The burial records in England show he died in England. Also, there's no record of him signing the registry of either ship. I'm thinking stowaway. Maybe there's a juicy backstory to all this!
Something many Brits forget (or don’t realize?) too is that, for many Americans, we share the same English ancestors, so the legacy of the English language comes from the same place.
Si, ju harr correcto mundo.😏
I've never seen an American say they speak English 'better' than the English do. We just demand to be taken seriously is all lol. I think we have a rather dignified manner of speaking.
It's just that when we broke away from England, we stopped evolving alongside them and we have different peculiarities. Once you acknowledge that, you can start celebrating both :)
No excuse for horseback riding though is there. I mean how else would you propose to do it...
Nah fam. American English is superior, that's why it's 'American English' instead of just 'English'. The UK can talk smack when they learn how to win a world war.
English language came from western German
@@alan-sk7kyYou want to ride a horse? eww thats messed up
I've seen it
A very lively and interesting presentation. I have a US southern accent. I think in the UK my accent is heard as an America accent but with a difference. A woman in Liverpool asked me, 'There is something unusual about your accent. Are you Canadian?'
Even within a state in the US, there are regional dialects. Of course we have several states that are the size of entire countries (e.g. Ireland)
Fun thing about season and series is how they are used differently in the US. "Season" refers to a single run, often a quarter or half year. While "series" refers to discrete groups of seasons in an IP: Star Trek, for instance, has multiple series, like the original series, the next generation, deep space nine, voyager, enterprise, etc., each containing multiple seasons.
And in baseball we have multiple series within a single season. 😁
@davidh.4944 there's even a difference how "series" used between sports in America.
In Baseball, where the same teams usually play each other multiple games in a row, thar grouping of games is called a "series"
In American football, the term "series" is used to refer to the all-time record between two teams. E.g. "the Packers lead the lions in the series 36-23" (which I did not look up, just pulled numbers out of the air)
You get that with anime as well.
Easy example is with the Pokemon anime, where there are generally 3 or 4 "seasons" in one "series" with the series in that case being which setting/game the story is focused on.
I had a British boss that used to give me a hard time for pronouncing ‘schedule’ the American way (skedule vs shedule) while simultaneously pronouncing the day after Monday as Chewsday 😂
Remind the Brit that "Schedule" is of Greek origin, like "Scholar" and not Germanic like "Schadenfreude" 😂
I no joke had someone say the word "Chursday" to me last week and I near lost it.
The difference in schedule/skedule makes word recognition difficult, don’t it?
@@g0679 *doesn’t
Brits are meant to pronounce it as 'chews-day'...I'm not understanding why this is funny?
Been a fan for years but will have to take a closer look at your shorts. Since you referenced them there must be something worth seeing there.
I studied linguistics in college so this was very interesting to me. I am from Philadelphia but went to college in the Midwest and in one of my first linguistics classes, we had to write down where we were from on a card. After looking at the cards, the teacher called upon me to pronounce Mary, marry, and merry since I was apparently the only person who spoke a dialect where they were all pronounced differently.
My pet peeve is in movies set in medieval times that the actors talk with modern "British" accents. Back then the accent spoke with would sound more like a combination of American and Irish accents. Hiring American and Irish actors and having them use their natural accents would be more historically accurate.
And what's with Robin hoods speaking in modern english? Should be Norman French or Chaucer English.
I wexe wery of this untreuth in movyng pycteures.
And king Arthur movies should be in brythonic for the knights of the round table and Anglo Saxon for the antagonists.
Nemas cethar rig Arthur lafaroth saosnec cempren pe nasescos ond Ƿe eac þa wiðersacan sceolon sprecan Eald Englisc.
@@yuki-sakurakawa If you put subtitles in there then I'm down with that. I'd actually like to hear what the languages would have sounded like.
Isn’t Modern British English just Normanized English anyways?
Not American and Irish, it’s a very specific accent that’s drawn from a language being a bastardised mix of old French and German.
@@Dave102693 The accent is the difference. In the 15th and 16th century, dropping consonant sounds became cool to incorporate into languages. French had already been doing this, but leaned heavily into it around this time. French took a huge deviation from other Romance languages like Spanish around this time. English began doing this with r's and then t's and other consonants. The split between North America and Britain happened prior to the accent change really catching on, which is why there is such different accents on both continents.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear you mention the High Tider accent. I was born and raised in the area and have friends and family with such thick accents I can barely understand them. I've lost a lot of mine from being around other people. There's also an island off the coast of Virginia, Tangier, that has a similar accent.
Down East?
Mainers in the northeast coast refer to themselves as down east, but in Carteret County NC Down East is specifically east of North River. Which honestly makes way more sense to me. Carteret county NC is one of the places he mentioned that still has that Accent.@@77thTrombone
@@Pupil0fGod yes, Down East. Otway, Marshalburg, Harker's Island, Bettie.... I had family from Diamond City.
@@willowthistle3648 Cool, I went to east carteret. small world
A wonderful movie about the retention of old English pronunciation is The Song Catcher. It is a movie about the capture of old 17th century folk songs from England . The Appalachian mountain people retained antique pronunciation and words. I also am a linguist from many years ago.
I took an ESL class from a German teacher when my parents first migrated to the US. Her way of teaching me basically included a mix of British vocabulary along with the American English I was learning. I knew of Aluminio in Spanish, so when she taught me to say Aluminium sort of made sense to me. Certain English pronunciations of various words make more sense to me because of the similarities to Spanish. Either way, I think both English and American pronunciations sort of mesh in a fluid manner which made my path to fluency easier.
British spellings might've made more sense to you since they're closer to French, another Latin-derived language.
As an American living in Europe, there are far more British expats than American ones, and the British are often insufferable in their open disdain for American English. That’s if they even acknowledge it as being English at all, since many refuse to call it “American English” and instead insist on referring to it as “American”. (That’s just before they then berate us for the arrogance of using the demonym “American”, since we aren’t the only country in the Americas, despite all the remaining countries having more specific demonyms.) We are accused of “butchering” “their” language through “laziness”. (Quotes not misused for emphasis, but used as actual quotes of things I’ve heard.) The fact that both dialects have evolved away from their common ancestor, and that British English has evolved away from said common ancestor more aggressively, is lost on them. As is the fact that they routinely compare slang from the most nonstandard American dialects to RP, while ignoring the myriad non-RP dialects of England _that use the very same non-RP forms they’re complaining about in “American”._ For example “ain’t”, which is not an American innovation, but a longstanding contraction in many dialects of British English.
Want to see the Brits lose their shit? Go to the comments section of any video about soldering made by an American. The Brits cannot restrain themselves from whining about how we don’t pronounce the L in “solder”, even though the American pronunciation is actually closer to the source French word, and that the L is the result of the phony-baloney relatinization in the early industrial age.
It all gets quite tiring, and even though I shouldn’t let it get to me, it does. I have studied linguistics, so I know what I’m talking about, but to the British, it’s just American hubris, even though British linguists will tell you the same thing I did.
No one likes being called out as a sinner
As an American, I too complain about the unpronounced L in solder, because nobody *at all* would hear that word for the first time and think, “Oh boy, this is definitely spelled ‘solder’!” Not here, anyway
@@theenderdestruction2362 ???
@@wolf6195 As I said, the L in solder was added _after the fact_ to make it look like Latin.
@@tookitogo I did get that from your original comment. That sort of makes it worse
I was raised in Zimbabwe (English) and Canada and now live in the USA. I started out a bit on the arrogant side, but quickly realized (like you) that most of my old mis-conceptions about Americans and what they had done to the English language were just sour grapes and group think by my previous countrymen. When I talk with my old friends and family, it is very difficult for them to understand my change in perspective and very few are willing to open up their minds to possibility that their way is no better (and often worse) than the American one. Anyway, point is, I appreciate what you are doing here.
This is really refreshing to hear, speaking as an American. If you're interested in exploring this further, HL Mencken's "The American Language" goes into the history of British elitism towards American speech. Published in the 1930s but still very relevant and informative. Two centuries ago there were Brits who were so taken aback by our multisyllabic slang and our borrowed words from Spanish and indigenous languages (eg, "canoe") that they wanted American dialect classified as a separate language lol
When I finally found my mothers folks in Canada, my cousin was surprised I didn't sound like a country bumpkin. Since I'd lived in Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache communities after the Y2K layoffs, I'd picked up the habit of ending sentences with, "aaaye" or "ennit". The first time he caught me using a y'all, I had to defend myself that it was a black y'all, not a southern one, but I was raised 30 miles from Antietam just under the Mason/Dixon line. Before the pandemic, I met two Airforce wives from England who thought I was mocking them. But I really wasn't aware I was only drawing from Absolutely Fabulous and Monty Python. My folks actually come from Wales and Hastings, but one great aunt from Liverpool made sure we could hide our Celtic brogue left over from the Great Migration when our cousin US Grant was considered mixed race.
Well said!
i do concur @@loveroflife1914
This is one of the most interesting videos I've seen in a quite a while! 😮
@lostinthepond you really need to do a video about Hawaiian pidgin English. It's probably the most unique version of the language that exists in the states.
I had always thought it was just Daniel Webster flipping off the stuck-up sticky beaks in the Motherland. This is a far richer topic than I had anticipated!
do you mean, noah webster? i can never keep them straight.
And the Brits won't admit how much their dictionary writer Samuel Johnson ALSO inserted his agenda into the language and changed things. When they accuse Americans of changing the language they fail to admit they changed it just as much.
@@davidkermes376 You are correct.
Daniel Webster was a stateman from NH.
Noah Webster wrote "An American Dictionary of the English Language".
They were cousins.
Originally words like "defense", "offense", and "pretense" were spelled with "CE", Noah changed them to "SE"
He removed the "u" from the words "humor (humour)" and "color (colour)"
He removed the "k" from the words "public (publick)" and "music (musick)".
He also removed the second "L" in the words "canceled / cancelled" and "traveled / travelled", although both spellings are accepted these days.
Noah Webster but yeah lol
@@tfosss8775 He also changed "plough" to "plow". He did that with other such words to make them comprehensible.
When I was learning Arabic, the most trouble I had was the different dialects. It’s a long story. Standard Arabic is what you’re taught if you’re learning it in America. This dialect is most common in, as an example, Al Jazeera news reports. But I was told by native Arabic speaking friends that the Egyptian dialect is the most widely understood. This is due to most of the Arabic language media like movies and TV being created in Egypt. And the Egyptian Arabic dialect is quite different from standard traditional Arabic.
I was also told all of this from a friend who had recently moved to the US
Arabic is like Chinese. Not different dialects but whole different languages. It would be like calling Latin and all romance language to be one language with dialects
@@napoleonfeanorThey're not as Ununderatandable as Chinese and Latin
I'm an Arab and they are mutually intellegable
@@napoleonfeanor I’m a second language learner of Arabic and understand almost all dialects, the exception being Moroccan Arabic which is very difficult to follow. But Arabic dialects are understood like British, American, and Australian English dialects (with the exception of certain accents).
To be clear, I didn’t say people couldn’t understand me.
Also, I can understand most Arabic dialects to an extent.
It’s always funny the “well, actually, 🤓” people that pop up with comments like this.
I’m talking about in the very beginning stages of learning Arabic and I’m also talking about how native speakers viewed the way I spoke it.
In fairly recent years, I have become interested in dialects of English to an extent. Sometimes, I'll go down a rabbit hole of accent tags for accents around the U.S. Sometimes I'll even ask customers where they're from if they have an accent I've never heard of or if the accent sounds familiar but not local. I'm a U.S. Southerner, and every once in a while, I'll detect different kinds of Southern accents or accents from other regions of the U.S. Sometimes, I guess them right, like when I recognized a Louisiana accent because the customer pronounced words like "then" with a D sound like in "den." I'd also guessed a Mississippi accent right once because they sounded almost like they were saying "Ahss" when saying "ice."
I did once mistaken a different Louisiana accent for a New England accent, though, because apparently the Yat accent in New Orleans sounds like a Boston accent.
These observations are a treasure!
I think we need to talk about how Larry is Losing his Accent. You're one of us now Bud nothing you can do about it 😂😂😂
He’s doomed 😂
You can still hear the Grimsby boy when he says “us” as “uzz”. That’s classic Lincolnshire. Also Yorkshire. It’s just refreshing to encounter an Englishman who will defend America to the point of willingly joining the side. Bless you, Laurence. You still sound plenty English to the average American ear, but at home I’m sure they consider you Yankified. I.e., ruined.
Cue Progressive-esque voice: "we can't stop you from becoming American...but we can all learn what got lost in the pond."
Don't do it, don't do it! Have two accents. LOL
He doesn’t sound at all American to me.
Lawrence - Thanks. An acquaintance once state the ultimate definition of the language: "The English Language is what happens when Germans try to speak Friench and fail successfully."
Love this ! 😂
With help from the Greek language, of course!
My pet peeve is when people pretend they can’t comprehend someone when they know damn well what the other person is saying, or they act so fascinated by someone’s accent like they think that person is the only person who’s ever existed with that accent. As an American with a British mother, I’ve seen this happen both ways. Accents are fascinating, but it gets really old when people feel the need to copy your accent poorly or repeat words back to you, like you enjoy hearing people pretend to struggle to say “tomato” in a different way and just repeat it over and over again like they’re toddlers learning how to speak for the first time, because a different pronunciation is just so “novel”.
I have been asked to 'perform' my (very boringly home counties/southern English) accent so many times. I know that no harm is meant and I don't mind when people notice it for the first time. But yes, it is tiring when the same people ask again and again, no matter how delighted they seem to be to hear it. Conversely, I am not at all delighted by my accent sounding different in everyday life. I can't easily order something as simple as a 'water' at a restaurant, for example. But on the other hand, I cringe inwardly when attempting to sound American.
I'm not so sure about poor and pour. I pronounce "poor" with the long "o", and "pour" with the short "o". I might just be the odd one out, though. I also pronounce the words that end with "t" instead of the glottal stop.
In Maine, if they didn't adopt an often difficult to pronounce Native American or English place name, we just named towns after entire countries. If you ever want to visit Norway, Peru, China, Mexico, Denmark, Sweden or Poland just cruise around Maine for a couple days (I've been to all of them and can say I spent two years working in Poland and confuse the hell out of people, lol).
I love Maine.
I walked across the entire state of Maine in less than a day.
Haha lived in the Oxford/Poland/Paris area for a while and told people I was dating a girl from Paris 😂😂
@@johnnynephrite6147 North to south or west to east...? It's a five hour drive between Presque Isle and Portland.
@@magicdog9523 thats only 260 miles. dont you have paved roads in Maine?
I appreciate your respect for both American and British English - and your open-mindedness contrary to the “groupthink”…on both sides. :-)
Agreed!
AMEN !
I just watched your "Forward" video. I saw that you had a sticker of the Gemini giant on your laptop. It made me smile not sure why but I thought it was cute. Anyway I just wanted to say that I am glad you were able to see it in person because they are moving it to somewhere else. I am 51 and I'm sure that statue is older than I am. It's been there as far back as I can remember.
I love your channel! Informative and fun!😁
First time here! Thoroughly enjoyed! New sub.
After having served with the Royal Military as being in the US Army for many years, the conclusion that I came to was, "It wasn't America that messed up English." haha
'The Royal Military'???? Do you know what 'hoist with your own petard' means?
@@wessexdruid7598not sure what the captain in TNG has to do with anything.
@@BrianOblivionB So - you don't know what it means, either.
@@wessexdruid7598 sure I do, Jean-luc Patard. Just not sure what he has to do with anything.
Who or what is ''the royal military''?
Modern Day Brits claiming that "we're right because we invented the language" is particularly amusing when you stop to wonder which evolution of the language they even mean. A modern day Brit and a modern day American have equal roots in a common ancestoral version of the language from hundreds of years ago, but out countries have experienced divergent evolution from that moment of splitting cultures. As you have shown us many times before, there are many instances where American English is more true to the Historical British English that both Modern Brits and Modern Americans have deviated from over the centuries
I prefer cousin Avis take in Snatch. “blagged? Speak English to me Tony, I thought this country spawned the fucking language and I get here and no one seems to speak it.”
@@Mostlyharmless1985England sure does produce a lot of slang
I mean the language was created through subjugation so what else do you expect
If an Englishman said to me, an American, "We invented it." I would say, "Yes, yes we did." lol
@@rochellesalo2509 Nah m8 your ancestors decided to fuck off to the New World and took our beautiful language hostage and NOW look at it, full of "rizz", "cap", "no cap",
"fr fr, ong ngl"
Hideous
I have a combination Boston-Australian accent (or Bostralian, as some friends refer to it). It has been called many things, including "the most beautiful sound since the invention of music", "glorious", and "an utter linguistic atrocity". In the fifteen years since this accent began forming, hundreds of people have attempted to pick it; only two have ever guessed successfully.
They should really hire me to do voiceovers and advertisements though.
Fantastic breakdown! The bit about High Tide reminded me of a small island in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, where they still speak a dialect of English that can be identified as Elizabethan. Sadly, that's dying out as the young people leave the island and the island itself is quite literally disappearing into the Bay.
As a Virginian, I can assure you that the island is on the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. It is only reachable by ferry boat except during the winter when the ferry boat doesn't run. 🤔
@@pablohammerly448 Ah, my mistake! Sorry!
So refreshing when a British guy isn't just insulting me for being born in the country my parents chose to migrate to 😊
just make fun of lousy british food
@@praetor4118 Britain was never a super power. A super power is a country that has the capability of fighting the entire world in a war. There have only ever been two.
@@praetor4118What should they be doing instead? Allying with China?
that isn't the definition of superpower.@@redrick8900
But we like insulting you!!!! We love to insult each other, especially up north, as it's our way of showing affection.
So, I grew up in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, close to the border with Virginia. My hometown had three different common dialects, and which one you used largely depended on who you grew up around. You could sit at the lunch table in high school and hear three completely different accents out of people who grew up a few miles away from each other, and it was just normal to us. Most of us worked to get rid of our accents when we realized that outsiders automatically subtract ten points off your IQ when they hear a southern drawl, but even decades later, my Canadian wife can’t understand a word I say when I’m around folks from my hometown.
Where? If you don’t mind. I have moved to Virginia near the North Carolina line and there sure are some accents here.
@@renafielding945 A little town about 30 minutes south of Danville. Piedmont and Appalachian were the most common, with a strong Black community that had their own thing going.
I'm in the same boat (west virginia) the kids on my side of town from the country spoke with an Appalachian accent but on the northern side of town you heard more of a Pennsylvania accent
@@gatling216 sounds like here. Danville is the closest place we can recycle glass.
You shouldn't let other people's ignorant understanding of your culture affect you. Keep your southern drawl.
As a non-native English speaker living in the US, I thoroughly enjoyed this video! I much prefer the American English (well, most of the varieties), as it's easier to me for comprehension. I once missed my connecting flight at Heathrow because I was asking for directions and couldn't comprehend most of the people there. Even the author of the video is a bit difficult to follow just due to the inflections and overall rhythm of speech. It's actually easier for me to comprehend the way some Scots and Irish speak. "Proper English" mostly reminds me of John Cleese skits. I've had friendly arguments with American friends, who claim that they can hear the difference between the words "poppy" and "puppy", while I continue to maintain that they only "hear" it in context.
I like your post; It's interesting. It might be because of where I'm from (American Pacific Northwest) but to me there is a difference I hear clearly between poppy and puppy without any context. Poppy phonetically for me is p-ah-pee vs puppy being p-uh-pee. Vowel sounds in languages are interesting to me considering sometimes they are very important for a word to be correctly heard and other times it doesn't matter and just sounds like a different accent. I knew a Spanish speaker who learned English second and had a real hard time pronouncing/hearing the difference between butter and batter. Language is cool. :) Also, I'm sorry you missed that flight.
@@patrickknoph6313I believe you, but then do you believe yourself? ;) I wonder if that's just how you subvocalize them to yourself when you know which word it is. If we could do a double-blind study with a recording of the same voice, could we all tell the difference? I'm sure that it's possible to intentionally pronounce them differently, but not everybody does, IMHO. Yes, languages are cool. Thank you for responding.
@@alexk3088 ‘poppy’ and ‘puppy’ sound vastly different in every British and American accent I can think of (I’m English FWIW).
@@fuckdefed "vastly different" 😂
@@alexk3088 Your theory would be easy to test. Have an American English speaker read 'poppy' and 'puppy' to another American English speaker, and have the second one write down what word they heard. They're quite different to our ears, and I doubt a mistake would be made. I'm learning Spanish, and we had a whole lesson on the difference between 'p' and 'b'. I couldn't understand why as none of us English speakers could hear that we were pronouncing them in a way that confused the native Spanish speaker. I can't tell the difference between a Spanish 'b' and 'v'... but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
7:08 as a North Carolinian, I can confirm that there area crazy amounts of dialects. Ive gone to somewhere 20 minutes away and all of a sudden everyone is speaking like they are from the bayous of lousiness, then i go 20 minutes another direction and all of a sudden everyone sounds like they need to blow their nose and remember what a vowel is.
Funny thing about American dialects - as you said, because the full country is so large, you might drive hundreds of miles before encountering a dialect that's *significantly* different than one before. But, as we can pretty easily intuit, this also means that "hard lines" between regions and their dialects are much less common (though not always). The farther you travel south, the more southern the drawls become until you reach full-blown Ram-Ranch Texas, and when you start to move towards the coasts from there, you start to notice interesting fusions between the commonly-noted dialects. And then, of course, even in more rural states, once you hit a "big city" there's still one helluva shift (these tend to be the exceptions to the "no hard line" rule of thumb).
Philadelphia for example actually has a distinct dialect from New York City. Contrary to what others may think.
"Ram-Ranch Texas"? What does that mean?Also, Southern accents do not, as a rule, keeping getting "more Southern" the further South you go.
I grew up in coastal Mississippi and I never realized just how different my "southern" accent sounded from people further north in the state. Everyone kept going "are you from New Orleans?" when I'd talk
@@susanwhite7474 As a Minnesotan who moved to Texas, there definitely is an experience of "more southern". Kansas doesn't sound like the Dakotas, Oklahoma is getting rather southern, Texas is definitely southern. (It's own type of southern, but definitely southern).
But then you get into a big city like Dallas and it's much more metropolitan, many don't have a southern accent at all. But they still called me a yankee, even there. I didn't even know that word was still used like that, I thought it was an 1800's thing.
And don't forget the Canadian accents heard in the far northeast in places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York
I'm a French-Canadian, and our particular French dialect is actually closer to 17th century France than modern France's French. So there's an obvious parallel here - distance made the languages grow in different directions than in Europe.
There is a cover of House of the Rising Sun, translated in Old French, on TH-cam. The song's lyrics and translation both scroll on the screen as it plays. Reading the comments, so many people from France couldn't understand a thing, except in the written parts, while I was able to understand maybe 15% of the sung words because they sound more like my accent than France's.
That makes total sense--Colonial peoples will always retain older forms of a language.
I'm in the process of learning Louisiana Acadien French, and I've noticed this too!
I'm French from France and I agree that you, the French-Canadians, use a better French than us. For example, you're able to find a French word for each English word we incorporate in our language. We're also influenced by the other cultures coming into our country. I often hear young people use some Arabic slang, like "Wesh gro! Ca va mon khey?" (Hey yo! How is it going bro?).
I'm very sorry to hear that I will pray for you.
Blame the aristocracy.
The French spent a good long time ruining languages.
French sounded more like German before the 17th century.
Regarding the R and Rhoticity. Although some English folk have dropped it or softened it at the end of words like Far, some others have inserted the sound in places where it doesn't exist.
Forgive me - I am a father of a little one who is fond of Peppa Pig. This cartoon was the first time I took note of the R insertion. Instead of hearing the narrator say "Peppa and George" I heard him say "Pepperan George" - I've noticed this happens frequently when a word that ends in a vowel is followed directly by a word that begins with a vowel. Would love to hear your (former language student) take on the origin of this R
Very interesting...my family who has Irish Scottish background and our origins being Mid South, use words like "Reckon" as in "I think and I'm positive moving in that direction of action", my time growing up in Oklahoma I used words like "gonna" (going to), and "fixin" (trying to get motivation up), and the most famous is "you all" to mean everyone in the present group...when you hear it, you know you are home...because most people outside of Mid South don't use it it...
I heard people in Philly pronounce merry, Mary, and marry differently. However, I definitely don’t and I only live a few hours away. I’m editing my comment because I completely forgot about the wildest American Accent out there for me is the Baltimore Accent. It’s so distinct, but so under the radar. Where the hell did it come from?
We do -- "Mary will marry merry Murray" and they all sound different.
I say them all differently. I recall a story from when I was working at a museum in Massachusetts. Two of the folks on staff were named Don and Dawn. Someone joked to me that I (who grew up on the Jersey shore) and a woman from Cherry Hill NJ (just across the river from Philly, for those who don't know) were the only ones for who those were two different names.
@@cancermcaids7688 mirror is a hard one, as a kid I thought it ended in an “a”.
I grew up in the Midwest, but have lived in both Pittsburgh and Philly. All three were pronounced the same way where I grew up, but I now pronounce Mary and marry the same, but pronounce merry as I did in the Midwest.
@@cancermcaids7688 🤣 I lived in soCal for 26 years, and laughed out loud when you said they had three vowels total! Despite this though, they can somehow give the word "dude" 17 syllables.
I love your videos! The Brits “belittling” Jefferson for his use of the word “belittle.” I can’t stop laughing. 😂. I needed a laugh tonight. I just adore your videos!
Some of our American spelling differences were very deliberate. Noah Webster was kind of a radical in the sense that he believed Americans should have their own language. It was because of his influence, his spelling textbook, and his dictionary, that many of our spellings are different. It should also be noted that many of his ideas never caught on and when his dictionary was taken over by the Merriams, they undid about 80 percent of his spelling changes. Otherwise, we'd be using "wimmen" instead of "women".
Fascinating discussion, especially on the subject of rhoticity.
Susie Dent said in one of the Cats Does Countdown episodes that Americans came up with the expression "Stiff Upper Lip" to mean stoicism through adversity. Which is now such a staunchly British phrase that it's hard to believe.
That’s true, the expression was partially popularised by the Cole Porter song ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ which satirises us English, it’s a very catchy and funny song and can be found here on TH-cam.