Comment by mixmastamyk
2 days ago
Another fun fact... almost all "American spelling" came from Britain, i.e. variants that died out in Old Blighty in the 1800s. Accent as well. For the most part, they were the ones that changed!
There's more—the -ize spelling comes directly from the old Greek spelling. -ise and -re were forced-on/taken from French. The British like to taunt the French, but apparently have forgotten about the spelling thing, and criticize Americans (unknowingly) for not doing the same.
In short, don't take any crap from Brits on the subject, haha. Most of my chats with them happened during my backpacking days, before Wikipedia and so I was not able to explain at the time. I believed it too with no other information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
It’s a common misconception that American accents have changed less than British accents. Both accents have changed. There’s a pretty obvious example that American accents have changed in the fact that many American accents have vowel mergers that result in pronunciation mergers of syllables with different spellings that aren’t merged in non-American accents. Wikipedia gives the example odd-facade-thawed, which all rhyme in most American accents but which have completely different sounds in non-American accents.
Likewise some American accents have lost the distinction between the vowels in marry-Mary-merry, or merge the vowels in pin-pen.
If American accents had changed less then why would they continue to use spellings that no longer match pronunciation in their own accents but which do match in many non-American accents?
The reality is that both accent groups have diverged.
There are folks that do Shakespeare in the original accent, and it sounds modestly closer to the "average" American pronunciation than modern British.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronun...
Believe I saw a video on it on youtube or similar, where they have audio as well.
Presumably you're implying an average over British pronunciation also, but if you ask me that's even more of a leap than over the American.
Like the other chap said, it basically sounds like a West Country accent.
The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially.
One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this.
Shakespearean English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Some good reddit threads on the matter:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9ju72b/is_th...
https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/j3imwe/is_it_t...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/9oke84/is_...
Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable decisions here. BrE standardised earlier and kept some Frenchisms like -ise (the OED maintains that -ize is correct with -ise being valid) but this was likely because -ise is correct for some words like advertise, or prise (which AmE dropped entirely for pry, and weirdly took up burglarize) and universal -ise makes spelling easier. In some cases it's just because words/pronunciations came much later from French in BrE whereas they came from Spanish and Italian in AmE. American spelling on the other hand was intentionally simplified, and although the spelling reform Webster wanted never truly happened (if it did you'd be speaking the American languaj) it did lead to the dropping of -our for -or, -re for -er, -oe for -e, etc.
I'm biased but I do prefer the etymological spelling, even if it means that we do say lieutenant differently.
“Better heritage” lol. Hardly.