He meant what he said, thinking about the accent you get on contemporary tv and in today's cinema. He's wrong, but the view that American English is a better gu

He meant what he said, thinking about the accent you get on contemporary tv and in today's cinema. He's wrong, but the view that American English is a better guide to Early Modern English pronunciation than British pronunciation is widespread. I think there's many holes in the theory, based on a much-too-simple view, but there probably had been some enlightenment to be derived from the theory up till about seventy years ago (I don't mean the old American stage accent - the mid-Atlantic accent - I mean the normal American accent on the street). If you started with RP and then added standard AmE to that, you probably would have felt you made lots of progress to your understanding of EMnE - Americans retain lots of r's and their "a" had probably a more conservative distribution in some sense. Their accent is more strongly influenced by non-rhotic English than rhotic parts of Britain, though. Nowadays, their "o" has innovated and "a" has innovated in many respects too. Americans have kept reducing distinctions before r, so that they say "shirly" instead of "surely" and no distinction is made between long and short vowels before /r/. The length distinction has weakened further, so that the claim often seen "English doesn't have long-short vowels, but tense-lax vowels", though not accurate, is less unfair now than it would have been a century ago. The rounded vowels have caught up with, and in many cases overtaken, the drift forward started earlier in England. (I'm pretty sure America is planning to outdo Greek with the number of sounds that merge as /i/.) No language stands still, especially not in a highly mobile empire. Colonial lag applies to the periphery, but America is now surely the centre of English development.