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> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. And when the spelling was largely fixed by William Caxton, who
by Angostura 3y ago
> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles.
And when the spelling was largely fixed by William Caxton, who pronounced the words with a 15th century Kentish accent
- hinkley 3y agoThe rumor is that after the Revolutionary war, English nobility affected an accent change to distance themselves from those Americans, and that a historically accurate miniseries about the American Revolution should feature British Officers with something approaching a southern drawl, rather than the modern posh British accent. Basically the American South did not get the memo about changing English accents.
- Angostura 3y agoI'll let you look at modern English spellings - Know, though, thought etc etc and decide for yourself whether that looks like a transcript of southern American english:)
- MrJohz 3y agoI'd love for you to correct me on this, but I believe this is nonsense. The only places that discuss this are very dubious articles from infotainment-style blogs, and I can't find anything to back this up on Wikipedia, let alone anything more reputable. IIRC, the element of truth that begets the lie here is that the Southern accent does have some elements in common with older British accents. But it's not clear whether those elements are retained from those old British accents, or whether they've simply been added into the accent later. And even then, we're talking about very specific features - I think the rhotic R is one of them? - and not the accent as a whole.