The German Language

[Regina]

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.

I will listen for that a sound when playing my audio books. I have to assume their dramatizations are authentic British. They’re professionals. Some of them speak what sounds like “the Kin’s English” and some of them sound like they speak British street English which is hard to follow. But I will listen more closely.

I don’t recall the kinds of changes Redbeard spoke of, either.  Did he say when that happened?

But there were other changes. Particularly the shift away from Elizabethan/Shakespearean/King James English which was still spoken by the American Quakers in the 19th century.

I may be wrong but I believe the letter J was introduced in the 16th or 17th century.

It doesn't really matter which dialect they're using, all British people do that hard fast "a" sound. The only difference is that Southerners and posh twats will drag out the letter "a" into a long "ah" in some words, but not all. Like "glaaahss".

Your other questions, I have no idea. The transformation into modern English was slow. Elizabethan/Early Modern English actually wasn't dramatically different to today, it just had the ye olde-ness with the "thou canst" "thy" etc. A lot of people think Elizabethan is "Middle English", but it's not. Real "Old English" (pre-1000AD) and even "Middle English" (1000-1400), modern English speakers would actually struggle to understand them. I don't really know anything more than that, I only know where it came from and what languages have influenced it.