RE: The German Language
January 17, 2016 at 8:18 pm
(This post was last modified: January 17, 2016 at 8:19 pm by Regina.)
(January 17, 2016 at 6:21 pm)Rhondazvous Wrote:(January 17, 2016 at 4:23 pm)Yeauxleaux Wrote: Interesting you call "fortnight" archaic, that word is still commonly used in The UK
You can see the beginnings of language shift have happened in the differences between British and American English. A few centuries of relative separation has already made some differences in the words we use. It just hasn't happened at the same speed that Medieval English and German emerged, because we haven't been as isolated from eachother.
It'll probably stop happening altogether in the modern world, because we have international media and constant contact between different nationalities now. British and American English have been getting more similar in the last few decades, not less. The same can probably be said for Iberian Spanish and forms of Latin American Spanish.
What part of the UK are you in? Your name seems to have a french spelling, but I suspect you are not in France.
Growing up in Washington D. C., I didn’t realize that the vowels we used were actually British. My mother’s sister is my aunt, not my ant.
There were regional differences in the states as well. As close by as Philadelphia there was a marked difference in pronouncing the first syllable of words like daughter (door {without the final r}, dah) and water (war, wah).
I'm from Birmingham, but irrelevant : I spell my name like this just because I like the Frencheaux spelling, it's not a regional British thing.
Northern British people say "Ant" instead of "Aunt" as well sometimes. They also say "laff" for "laugh" like Americans do, although they do it with an even shorter, harsher "a" sound that Americans don't seem able to make. British people, in all regions, have a really hard quick "a" sound that you'd hear in words like "cat" or "tacky", but American's don't seem able to form it the way we can. When I hear Americans say "a" it always comes out more like a breathy or nasaly "e" or "ah".
I wasn't aware the spellings had changed in English since Medieval times though, I thought it was all the same standardised written English by like the 1400s.
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"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie