Jake

Important If True 22: Air Bud and the Average Man

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On 7/18/2017 at 3:39 PM, Jake said:

Pretty sure that got dropped in America because of some French influence. Americans pronounce "pasta" in a more Italian way and get mocked by Brits for it despite them saying it incorrectly. We're not trying to be snooty in weird isolated ways, we just had a different mix of immigrants than you in our formative years. 

Oh, I know - it's purely an irrational annoyance! Though it is odd how it's ONLY herbs, but not herbivore, herbaceous, Herby, etc.

Language is weird, and I realise this more and more every day as my daughter is starting to learn to read - the English language really is such a mish-mash of different linguistic heritages. It reminds me of this passage (misappropriated to Mark Twain):

Quote

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

 

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It's funny that anyone would ascribe that to Mark Twain, because by rendering "letters" as "letez," it betrays its British or Australian origin by dropping the "r" in pronunciation.

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2 hours ago, Chris said:

It's funny that anyone would ascribe that to Mark Twain, because by rendering "letters" as "letez," it betrays its British or Australian origin by dropping the "r" in pronunciation.

 

Before the Second World War, most Southern American dialects of English were non-rhotic, and apparently it was considered more prestigious there than rhotic speech. "Nauh see he-uh, suh" in your best Foghorn Leghorn and all that. It's arguable that, beyond the generalized cultural pressure of the New South, most Southerners abandoned non-rhotic speech over the course of the twentieth century because African American Vernacular English had begun to assimilate the white South's non-rhotic tendencies and thereby "spoiled" that prestige.

 

That said, the passage does actually appear to be from a Brit, an M.J. Shields writing to The Economist in 1971, and it acquired the association with Mark Twain when transferred over to the internet.

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"If there is a quote, someone in the Internet will at one point attribute it to Mark Twain." - Mark Twain

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59 minutes ago, Gormongous said:

 

Before the Second World War, most Southern American dialects of English were non-rhotic, and apparently it was considered more prestigious there than rhotic speech. "Nauh see he-uh, suh" in your best Foghorn Leghorn and all that. It's arguable that, beyond the generalized cultural pressure of the New South, most Southerners abandoned non-rhotic speech over the course of the twentieth century because African American Vernacular English had begun to assimilate the white South's non-rhotic tendencies and thereby "spoiled" that prestige.

 

That said, the passage does actually appear to be from a Brit, an M.J. Shields writing to The Economist in 1971, and it acquired the association with Mark Twain when transferred over to the internet.

 

Interesting! My impression of non-rhotic English is that it is itself a fairly modern affectation—a cursory Wikipedia search seems to basically confirm this: "No English authorities describe loss of /r/ in the standard language prior to the mid-18th century, and many do not fully accept it until the 1790s." "Americans returning to England after the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 reported surprise at the significant changes in fashionable pronunciation. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, though it continued to be variable as late as the 1870s."

 

Your point about Southern American dialects makes sense and is well taken, particularly in the context of a sense of prestige, presumably in line with many other traditions of British aristocracy favored by the South and parts of the Northeast. It seems like Mark Twain would have been born into that evolution: "The adoption of postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation as the British prestige standard in the late 18th and early 19th centuries influenced American port cities with close connections to Britain, causing upper-class pronunciation in many eastern and southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah to become non-rhotic."

 

It was weirdly forgetful of me to forget that property of Southern American speech, but also my general hazy memory that non-rhotic speech is a phenomenon that largely took hold after the establishment of the American colonies (rather than American colonists/citizens themselves actually originating a shift to non-rhotic American-sounding speech) is basically true to history.

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23 minutes ago, Chris said:

It was weirdly forgetful of me to forget that property of Southern American speech, but also my general hazy memory that non-rhotic speech is a phenomenon that largely took hold after the establishment of the American colonies (rather than American colonists/citizens themselves actually originating a shift to non-rhotic American-sounding speech) is basically true to history.

 

Yeah, I was reading that Wikipedia article, too. It's an interesting example of America being influenced by contemporary British linguistic practices, since in many cases of divergence, America is a preserve of pre-independence British linguistic practices. I guess the fact that it was an elite fashion trend, rather than a usage-borne development, explains it. Actually, patterns of prestige speech in general are fascinating, because it's almost always that something is a huge fad until the casuals get wind of it, a process that probably happens really quickly nowadays with the internet being a thing.

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Given that, even accounting for Nick's alleged neuroses, the Thumbs crew are well above average in wealth, health, education (and probably several other good things) for the nation (much less the world), signing on to re-centering the average around one of them seems like it would almost be a moral imperative.

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"Stay spicy" seems like such an average tagline, yet half of America finds it even more annoying than Jake does.

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