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nama became name, doon became down - at least in
most places it did. At the same time the
g’s
and
k’s
of
gnat
and
knight
disappeared and we stopped with
those raspy
ght
sounds that linguists called the
velar
fricative,
night, though, but we kept the spellings
which reflect the pronunciations during the time of
Henry VIII.
The huge variation in the way words were spelled
reflecting how they were spoken presented a huge
challenge to William Caxton when he introduced the
printing press to England in 1476 and on top of that
he had to make choices for what to call even quite
common objects for which there were many dialect
choices. In the prologue of one of his books he tells
the story of a sailor becalmed in the Thames Estuary
who goes ashore and tries to order some eggs in a
tavern.
Eggs?
Said the puzzled landlady.
I’m sorry
I don’t speak French.
Neither of course does the
English sailor who only gets what he’s after when
he learns that the local word is
eyren
. Eggs was an
old Norse word mostly used in the north whereas
eyren
was an Anglo Saxon word used in the south.
Caxton used eggs and as a result today so do we.
The dialect of London, where most publishing
houses were located, became the standard.
Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the first
English dictionary was published in 1604.
Non Rhyming Couplets
We can see how much pronunciation has changed
since the time of Shakespeare because of his 154
sonnets, to put it bluntly the rhymes don’t work (for
us) in two-thirds of them. For William Shakespeare
proved rhymed with loved. We can also pick up clues
from spellings again. For example Shakespeare
originally spelled the word film (which he used it to
mean membrane) as
philom
like the Irish or
Liverpudlian
fillum
. Linguists say that if you listen to
the original pronunciation of Shakespeare you can find
traces of all the accents of English spoken today in
America, Australia, Wales, Ireland and the West
Country. Indeed American English has retained more
elements of the Elizabethan English spoken in the time
of Shakespeare than modern British English has.
Did you know that the Americans didn’t invent
fall
for
autumn or
trash
for rubbish, these words arrived on
ships from England and were preserved in the colonies
while lost at home. However, persistent claims that
there are pockets of the Appalachians or other remote
areas where the speak an unchanged form of
Elizabethan English are poppycock which is itself an
American word that came from the Dutch settlers.
By 1776 whether declaring an Independent America
or swearing allegiance to King George III Americans
sounded much the same, American and British accents
had yet to diverge. It is surprisingly the British accent
that has changed drastically compared to relatively
subtle changes for American accents. Traditionally
English whether spoken in England or America was
largely
rhotic
which means that the
r
sound in words
like hard and winter is pronounced.
Non-rhotic
speakers say
hahd
and
wintuh.
Around the time of the
American Revolution
non–rhotic
speech came into
fashion with the upper class in southern England,
particularly around London. This is because people of