6 ms·

Not just English in England wrt New England, but everywhere in the new world this is the case: Quebecois descends from an older form of French, Brazilian Portug

Not just English in England wrt New England, but everywhere in the new world this is the case: Quebecois descends from an older form of French, Brazilian Portuguese from an older form of Portuguese (modern European Portuguese is insane to listen to next to Brazilian Portuguese), same for Spanish. The wonders of isolation!

asveikau 7y ago
Spanish also has interesting geographical stories alongside that narrative. Eg. Latin America lacks an /θ/ sound because the colonizers came from places like Seville.
solipsism 7y ago
The claim wasn't about New England English deriving from an older form of the language. The claim is that today's New England English more closely resembles that older form than today's England English.
- barberousse 7y ago
  Those aren't equivocal? We're just putting the emphasis on one end or the other it looks like
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Weirder, after hearing Brits scoff at "Americanisms" for years I was pretty surprised to learn that 90% of them actually came from Britain. They even changed their accent late in the millennium. You can go to see Shakespeare in its original accent and it sounds closer to Welsh/Irish/American than the Queeen's English. The more you know…
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  If you ignore Webster's aberrations - as every attempt to simplify spelling historically, has ended up complicating it, and he was no exception there... Like the 16th century attempt to simplify the language that had scholars adding letters so it was more internally consistent with Latin or Greek roots. Thus debt was created from det, doubt from dowt, scythe from sythe and hundreds of others, and a few got shorter - warre becoming war is the only one I can remember. The other reforms and "simplifications" weren't prettier. A surprising amount of Americanisms, and even spellings - like recognize instead of recognise - not only started here, but were once preferred as more correct! It's only fairly recently that The Times - last 20 or 30 years - dropped "Oxford spelling" (As the OED goes that way too). Nowadays if you use that variant someone will inevitably cry Americanism. Web spell checker is, of course, whining about -ize above as it's in GB mode. Yet it cuts both ways - there's a lot of real Americanisms that have been forgotten in the US and are never identified as such in the UK. Got/gotten - British laziness or fashion decided gotten was no longer necessary somewhere along the line. Yet we still use forgot and forgotten. Go figure. Given the sheer quantity of English that's been begged, borrowed and stolen from other parts of the world, I don't understand the singular picking out of Americanisms. Though the US "I could care less" clearly only makes sense as GB's "I couldn't care less". Shakespeare's jokes and puns work SO much better in original pronunciation. Received pronunciation needs to die in a fire. Peace. :)
  - SiVal 7y ago
    "I couldn't care less" is the proper American form and the only form I heard growing up in the US. In recent decades, I have of course encountered the "could care less" form many times, but it's like "same difference" meaning "same thing": something that professional copy editors (which I used to be) will still probably repair unless it's being used to paint a picture of a character.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Interesting. My understanding is that -ize comes from the older Greek, while -ise is the French version. Which makes for a fun discussion when Brits claim it as their own. There's a good wiki on the subject if others are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
    - kwhitefoot 7y ago
      See the article on "-ize, -ise in verbs" in Fowler's Modern English Usage, Second Edition, where he makes the point that it is the French who changed from -ize to -ise.
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Yes, that was the point I was trying to make.
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    Gotten is a perfectly ordinary word in Scottish and Northern Isles English. And -ize is perfectly acceptable to many British English spell checkers. Unfortunately it seems impossible to find one that will reject -ise spellings when the -ize one is the more etymologically 'correct'. For instance, I am using Firefox with a British English checker and it, correctly, allows "advertise" but not "advertize"; however, it also allows both "mythologize" and "mythologise" when only the first would be accepted in the Oxford tradition. I'll be sticking with the advice in Fowler's Modern English Usage, Second Edition.
- barberousse 7y ago
  The other side this exposes to me is that America, in terms of its overall European-descended demographic, is more Irish, Scots, German than Anglican by far
ThePadawan 7y ago
There doesn't even have to be an ocean in between countries - Modern Swiss German shares a lot more with Old High German than modern High German, since Switzerland didn't participate in many shifts (e.g. diphthongization) in pronunciation!
Broken_Hippo 7y ago
One of my challenges learning Norwegian has been dialects. There is a "standard" written form. The dialects, however, might pronounce things differently, completely change a few words, or change the way you use or conjugate verbs. (Not to mention that there are 2 varients of Norwegian, but that's another story.). Immigrants are taught the straighforward version - an "Oslo dialect". The reason for this is mountains and isolation. You get a few villages that interact or a region that does so, and it varies wildly over the years before television and radio. People have simply kept the dialects in the modern age. Some are harder for native Norwegians than others, but supposedly they should all be understood.

asveikau 7y ago

Spanish also has interesting geographical stories alongside that narrative. Eg. Latin America lacks an /θ/ sound because the colonizers came from places like Seville.

solipsism 7y ago

The claim wasn't about New England English deriving from an older form of the language. The claim is that today's New England English more closely resembles that older form than today's England English.

barberousse 7y ago
Those aren't equivocal? We're just putting the emphasis on one end or the other it looks like

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Weirder, after hearing Brits scoff at "Americanisms" for years I was pretty surprised to learn that 90% of them actually came from Britain. They even changed their accent late in the millennium. You can go to see Shakespeare in its original accent and it sounds closer to Welsh/Irish/American than the Queeen's English. The more you know…

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
If you ignore Webster's aberrations - as every attempt to simplify spelling historically, has ended up complicating it, and he was no exception there... Like the 16th century attempt to simplify the language that had scholars adding letters so it was more internally consistent with Latin or Greek roots. Thus debt was created from det, doubt from dowt, scythe from sythe and hundreds of others, and a few got shorter - warre becoming war is the only one I can remember. The other reforms and "simplifications" weren't prettier. A surprising amount of Americanisms, and even spellings - like recognize instead of recognise - not only started here, but were once preferred as more correct! It's only fairly recently that The Times - last 20 or 30 years - dropped "Oxford spelling" (As the OED goes that way too). Nowadays if you use that variant someone will inevitably cry Americanism. Web spell checker is, of course, whining about -ize above as it's in GB mode. Yet it cuts both ways - there's a lot of real Americanisms that have been forgotten in the US and are never identified as such in the UK. Got/gotten - British laziness or fashion decided gotten was no longer necessary somewhere along the line. Yet we still use forgot and forgotten. Go figure. Given the sheer quantity of English that's been begged, borrowed and stolen from other parts of the world, I don't understand the singular picking out of Americanisms. Though the US "I could care less" clearly only makes sense as GB's "I couldn't care less". Shakespeare's jokes and puns work SO much better in original pronunciation. Received pronunciation needs to die in a fire. Peace. :)
- SiVal 7y ago
  "I couldn't care less" is the proper American form and the only form I heard growing up in the US. In recent decades, I have of course encountered the "could care less" form many times, but it's like "same difference" meaning "same thing": something that professional copy editors (which I used to be) will still probably repair unless it's being used to paint a picture of a character.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Interesting. My understanding is that -ize comes from the older Greek, while -ise is the French version. Which makes for a fun discussion when Brits claim it as their own. There's a good wiki on the subject if others are interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    See the article on "-ize, -ise in verbs" in Fowler's Modern English Usage, Second Edition, where he makes the point that it is the French who changed from -ize to -ise.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Yes, that was the point I was trying to make.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Gotten is a perfectly ordinary word in Scottish and Northern Isles English. And -ize is perfectly acceptable to many British English spell checkers. Unfortunately it seems impossible to find one that will reject -ise spellings when the -ize one is the more etymologically 'correct'. For instance, I am using Firefox with a British English checker and it, correctly, allows "advertise" but not "advertize"; however, it also allows both "mythologize" and "mythologise" when only the first would be accepted in the Oxford tradition. I'll be sticking with the advice in Fowler's Modern English Usage, Second Edition.
barberousse 7y ago
The other side this exposes to me is that America, in terms of its overall European-descended demographic, is more Irish, Scots, German than Anglican by far

ThePadawan 7y ago

There doesn't even have to be an ocean in between countries - Modern Swiss German shares a lot more with Old High German than modern High German, since Switzerland didn't participate in many shifts (e.g. diphthongization) in pronunciation!

Broken_Hippo 7y ago

One of my challenges learning Norwegian has been dialects. There is a "standard" written form. The dialects, however, might pronounce things differently, completely change a few words, or change the way you use or conjugate verbs. (Not to mention that there are 2 varients of Norwegian, but that's another story.). Immigrants are taught the straighforward version - an "Oslo dialect". The reason for this is mountains and isolation. You get a few villages that interact or a region that does so, and it varies wildly over the years before television and radio. People have simply kept the dialects in the modern age. Some are harder for native Norwegians than others, but supposedly they should all be understood.