Present Day English
excerpts from the
works of
Dr. Micheal Crafton
Department of English
State University of West Georgia
Carrollton, Georgia
(Spring 2000)
British and American Languages(?)
The
differences between British and American varieties of English.
The differences are trivial and not that
plentiful.
There are obviously
different choices in vocabulary
British / American
_____________________
Railway / Railroad
Angry / Mad
Lorry /
Semi-truck
Motorway / Interstate
Way Out / Exit
Fortnight / Two Weeks
And there are some minor syntactical differences: We say “in the hospital” and the British say “in hospital.” But these are very few.
The major difference is pronunciation and most of that is intonation rather than particular phonemes. However, we notice that many British a’s are pronounced as flat a’s where we pronounce as a front a, or ash, ae. The main the difference is in the intonation pattern, the rising and falling of tone. This is the difference you make when you attempt a British accent and this is the reason that songs don’t often sound particularly British because the singer is following the intonation pattern of the song, not speech.
You might go to the following link for some humorous differences between American and English speech. http://pages.prodigy.com/NY/NYC/britspk/main.html
The American Story in Brief
Regional Dialects
I. First
migration from England in the 1600's
Puritans
from East Anglia settled in New England and provided the distinctive features
of a New England dialect, the r-less dialect as in Hahvahd Yahd, rather than
Harvard Yard.
Cavaliers
from the English West Country, Shakespeare’s country, provided the r-stressed
dialect of old Chesapeake.
See Map1
II. Second migration 1700's
Southern
Midland or Appalachian dialect were created by the Scots-Irish who came to
American from Northern Ireland, landing in Philadelphia and moving out to the
Appalachian mountains from there: Scots to Ireland, Scots-Irish to Philly,
Philly to Appalachia.
See Map2
III. Third migration. 1800's
Western
Movement provides North, Central, South Midlands -- movement form the
East to West
See Map3
Remember: Non-English settlements' influence
provided material for Cajun accent in Louisiana and Spanish element in Western
accents.
The results of these historical movements are
evident in the regional dialects extant today.
These two graphics provide some of that information:
Ethnic dialects
IV. Fourth immigration -
The issue of the development of Black English, or Black Vernacular English, or Ebonics. The history of this variety of English has
been greatly studied; probably the most common view is that the slaves from
West Africa learned to speak a pidgin language that became naturalized and thus
a Creole. The Plantation Creole was
very similar to the speech of the southern barrier islands, like Gullah in
South Carolina and Georgia. Black
Vernacular English, then, develops from this Creole.
This
map shows the slave routes in 1700's and 1800's
See Map4
Northern
migration after Civil War 1865 to 1920's, the major conduit for the development
of Black Vernacular English
See Map5
You might want to view the Linguistic Atlas
project on Gullah
http://hyde.park.uga.edu/afam/index.html
V. The European migrations helps to account for
the ethnic dialects of NYC and Chicago and the Midwest.
This map shows the Europeans migrations
See Map6
VI.
World Migrations -- 3rd world
countries, Romance Language and Asian languages most influential.
The locations of English planted during the
period of the Empire are shown on this map.
See Map7
Semantics is a fascinating
and quite complicated sub-field of linguistics. But for our purposes we are just going to take note, one, that
meanings changes, and that, two, they change along set paths.
Meanings change by either
becoming more specialized or more generalized; by transfer of meaning from
realm to another, like concrete to abstract, and they become ameliorated or pejorated
in meaning.
1.
From
general to specific: deer meant small animals in 16th century, now
means a specific animal
2.
From
specific to general: thing meant a legislated group, an assembly in Anglo-Saxon,
now it means any item in general.
3.
Transfer
from concrete to abstract: understand meant literature to stand with or under,
now it means to comprehend; vogue once general for popular, then specific for a
magazine, then general again for style similar to that of the magazine Vogue.
4.
Meaning
becoming pejorative - toilet once polite, now a commode, a crapper.
5.
Meaning
becoming ameliorative - bad becomes baaaaadd!!
that means good.
New
Words - Where Do They All Come From.
Root Creations - very rare
to create a new word - examples, Kodak, Nylon, Orlon.
Echoic words - words to
sound like natural sounds, burp, bang, pink, tinkle.
Ejaculations - word that
just gush out; ouch, ah, ah ha, hee
Combing and compounding -
input, output, throughway, thoroughfare, tapedeck,
Combining by affixing - e.g.
-dom, wisdom, freedom, halaluja-dom, till kingdom come-dom.
Shortened forms
Clips - bra, mob, cab,
Acronyms - TV, VCR, DVD, EPA
Functional shift - create a
new word by changing its part of speech.
“Uncle me no uncles”; “It out-Herods Herod.” Here Shakespeare makes
verbs from nouns and even a proper name.
Common words from proper
names - Dickens --> dickensian, Chauvin --> chauvinism.
Foreign Sources in English.
During OE times:
Celtic languages provided
little; Latin much more; Scandinavian even more.
ME times
Very little from Celtic;
Latin more, French an enormous amount (10,000 words by 1500)
Early Modern Times
Latin a huge amount, Greek a
bit, Arabic a bit, French very little.
Modern Times
The classical languages in
the sciences; otherwise it is general adoption from all the languages that
English speakers had occasion to associate with: Spanish, Swedish, German, Hebrew,
Yiddish, Asian languages.
In Modern English the
importation of foreign words has decreased radically and now we tend to create
words from combining or affixing more than do we borrow.