Ooh! Interesting idea, RE.

Interesting, but I doubt it, at least here in the U.S. After all, what would the U.S. Postal Service deliver then?

Arnie, you capitalize the e? That makes it even a bit harder, though I always capitalize the i in Internet or the w in Web.

AOL (at least the UK version) already say "You've got mail" when you log in. I don't suppose there's much possibility of anyone expecting to receive snail-mail via AOL, though.

Yes, Kalleh, the E is capitalised. As I said it's our house style at work, not my own. Presumably it is by analogy with "Internet" and "Web", as you say.

Hi, I'm Erik and I'm new here, although I will say hello to Richard English and Kalleh as I have posted on the realbeer.com forum.
I'm only an interested amateur at the linguistics game so bear with me if I'm not terribly up on the way things are done!
Anyway to the point of my first posting. What's the current thought as to how the American and the similar Canadian accents have developed? Obviously when the US broke away from Britain the language was considerably different to now. Did the language at the time sound more like American or British English- and by that I mean in Britain too? I read somewhere that if you want to hear what English from the 18th Century actually sounded like you should listen to the way hillbillies speak or even perhaps Yosemite Sam! What is evident to me is that Americans speak using essentially a different part of their mouth to the British, but why should this be so?
I do realise that as the two countries went their separate ways so did the language and that we should be surprised that it actually stayed similar enough to understand each other!

I actually post as Bloodaxe on realbeer.com, Being of Anglo-Norwegian extraction I've heard all the jokes about where's my horned helmet, etc! I've been called called Erik The Viking and Erik Bloodaxe so many times I adopted it as my nickname when I go ten-pin bowling and also on a few other forums. Despite the nickname I'm really a mellow fellow even after a few halves (!)of real ale.

quote:

I'm only an interested amateur at the linguistics game so bear with me if I'm not terribly up on the way things are done!

Hi Erik . Good to have you on the forums. My ex-husband came from your neck of the woods. He was born in Middlesborough and lived in Billingham till he joined the RAF.

Don't worry, they're all very nice here and don't bite .

quote:

Anyway to the point of my first posting. What's the current thought as to how the American and the similar Canadian accents have developed? Obviously when the US broke away from Britain the language was considerably different to now. Did the language at the time sound more like American or British English- and by that I mean in Britain too? I read somewhere that if you want to hear what English from the 18th Century actually sounded like you should listen to the way hillbillies speak or even perhaps Yosemite Sam! What is evident to me is that Americans speak using essentially a different part of their mouth to the British, but why should this be so?

I heard a very interesting programme on BBC Radio Four a few weeks ago about the Outer Banks of North Carolina. From the extracts and interviews I heard, the accent seems to be almost English west country.

I had a quick google to see if I could find anything about and came up with this and here.

quote:

I do realise that as the two countries went their separate ways so did the language and that we should be surprised that it actually stayed similar enough to understand each other!

It was probably because of the continuing exposure of the nascent American culture to British influences (usually military and trade) until mass immigration from other cultures in the mid to late 19th centuries brought in other major dialects, such as Yiddish. These later imports stayed mainly in the big cities on the east coast - especially New York - because that was where the bulk of the immigrant ships landed.

I've also noticed that the South African and Australian/New Zealand accents have a lot in common with each other too, but they sound totally different from their northern hemisphere counterparts.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dianthus,

Welcome to Wordcraft, Erik! I have to run so I will say more tomorrow, but I wanted to be sure to say hi.

This has nothing to do with Erik's question, but is a comment regarding Bloodaxe's reference to Viking horned helmets. Just to right a wrong, I'd like to inform everyone that Vikings did NOT have horned helmets. That was a Wagnerian invention for the opera. Neither did Vikings have garish striped sails. And they did not have dragon heads on the prow of their ships, except when entering or leaving port.
I realize this demolishes cherished myths, but it's true.

quote:

I realize this demolishes cherished myths, but it's true.

What a disappointment. You'll be telling us next that, when they invaded a country, they just sang Viking songs to the natives, rather than raping and pillaging!

Is nothing sacred anymore?

Welcome, Eric. You will find that there are several of us here, including Kalleh and I, who appreciate fine beer. And we intend to sample a few pints thereof next October when we all (or as many as can make it) meet in Brimingham (England).

We do hope to see you there - booking are open.

Gee, Mark, you'll be telling me Hagar the Horrible doesn't exist either!
Actually I knew it wasn't true about the helmets but it doesn't stop everyone taking the mick with the cliches- typical ones being "You'll be off on your hols to Lindisfarne shortly, eh, to sack the monastry. Then kill the monks and rape any women- or is it the other way round?" and using rather bad accents somewhat akin to the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show. Lacking a sense of humour I just kill any micky takers with my (non existant) double headed axe!
Re. N. American accents is why they are so similar. You'd think if anything a Hispanic tinged accent might have arisen in say California for example. I do realise that this is sometimes the case with say the Amish with their Germanic accents but as they're nearly a closed society I'm not surprised there. The Canadian accent you might have expected to differ from the US more so than it does given the Country's links with the the British Empire and afterwards the Commonwealth. I know we can only take guesses with how people really sounded in Centuries past but it does make you wonder what people sounded like in the late 18th Century- is it North America that kept the general tones and Britain that changed? Or as I suspect both Countries began with the same starting point and have developed in their separate ways.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Erik Johansen,

It is curious, isn't it? We do have different accents, though, in different areas of the country. More than you might notice from over there. I can tell when someone is from Cleveland, as opposed to Central Ohio, where I live. I can distinguish Chicago folks from Bostonians . . . and of course, different parts of the South have different twinges of accents.

There are often times when I can't distinguish between British accents, though, and I most certainly do not know enough about them to be able to name where a person is from by hearing them. I figure that is just my personal ignorance, though.

Dear Richard,

You ALMOST got it right. They'll be singing Viking songs WHILE raping and pillaging. After all, what is life without song?

The Wizard of Oslo

Hagar is great. And I thoroughly agree with you regarding the other points in your posting. See my reply to Richard English!

As a kid, I sometimes used to wonder what "pillaging" really entailed. I had a (hazy) idea of what "raping" meant, so I thought that "pillaging" was something along the same lines. I was a little disappointed when I found out.

Hi Caterwauller! Whilst I said similar I meant more the Canadian and the US accents as a whole. I've travelled a bit in your Country, the last time Louisiana and Texas, the previous time driving down from Toronto across the border through Michigan to Illinois- I have friends in Aurora- then down through Indiana to Kentucky up through Ohio, then through Pennsylvania to Maryland then finally cutting upwards through New York State, then finally back across the border at Buffalo, it's given me a chance to appreciate your fine country anyway!
Rambling aside, the point I'm trying to make is that the N. American accent(s) is distinctive as is the Australia/NZ accent too. You know where the people are from.Now assuming that most settlers at first were from the British Isles and also assuming that most were working class where generally the accents SEEM to have been much the same as they are now, you would have expected a sort of amalgham of those accents- but I don't think it is. I've known people here who've travelled and lived all over the UK and they've picked up varied speech habits from different parts, but they haven't started sounding like Americans! Curiously enough the Aussie accent does sound more or less what I would have expected from a hotch-potch of working class British accents- it does seem to have elements of Cockney, West Country and Irish among others in it. One would have thought the American accent to have ended up sounding rather similar to the Australian one, but it's not so.
I know there were many other people from other countries settling in the USA but I rather got the impression that the majority arrived late in the 19th and early 20th Centuries and by that time the speech manner would have already been well established.

Just to take the thread a little further off-topic, I've been giving some thought to the Vikings going around raping and pillaging. It might be that the Vikings weren't so horny (sorry) as you might think. The original meaning of rape was "take away by force", "abduct", from the Latin word with that meaning, rapere. Cf Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock. The Sabine women weren't raped by the Romans in the modern meaning of the word; they abducted them and married them.

Apparently the Vikings often settled down fairly quickly with their new women in their new homelands. The Viking Age was a result of too little land and too large a population at home, and the only option they had was to sail away and find a living elsewhere. Occupation: plunderer. Sex: Yes, please.

Normandy (North-men) gets its name from the Vikings who settled there after being bought off and given the area so they wouldn't do their annual raid on Paris; King Canute in England was a Danish Viking (Knut). Since English-speakers would naturally drop the "K" when pronouncing "Knut", it would be "King Nut." And of course no self-respecting king wants to be addressed as "Nut" (!) so it is spelled "Canute" in English in order to retain the correct pronunciation. And York in northern England was once called Jorvik (pron: YOR-veek, or, eventually, YOR-ikk and York). Take the Viking tour in York and you'll see no horns on THOSE denizens!

To conclude (forgive the detours), the Vikings were pillagers, yes, but they readily accepted domestication if the alternative were offered. Dublin, York, the Danelaw (area NE of London), and Normandy were all heavily occupied by Vikings, if not outright settled by them. Give Hagar a chance, and he'll lay down his sword and build a house. Well, maybe not HAGAR...

quote:

... Normandy (North-men) gets its name from the Vikings who settled there after being bought off and given the area so they wouldn't do their annual raid on Paris ...

And they did have to be bought off - at great cost! All places in the east of England (nearest to Scandinavia and therefore where the Vikings had their greatest influence) paid their allotted sum of Danegeld in order to placate the Vikings. See here .

quote:

King Canute in England was a Danish Viking (Knut). Since English-speakers would naturally drop the "K" when pronouncing "Knut", it would be "King Nut." And of course no self-respecting king wants to be addressed as "Nut" (!) so it is spelled "Canute" in English in order to retain the correct pronunciation.

Modern English speakers do not pronounce the "k" in such words, but it was still going strong at the end of the 14th century, as was the final "e" at the end of words such as "goode".

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales shows such word forms very well.

The anonymous poem Gawain and the Green Knight, written in a different dialect from Chaucer's, still shows the old Saxon letter forms.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dianthus,

Thanks Dianthus for those links- makes for interesting reading!
I somehow have managed to make this topic slide Viking-ward, sorry about that! At least they're a people worthy of study, the greatest seafarers of their day and a people who left their mark certainly in the place-names in Northern England. Travel across Yorkshire and you can see many reminders of their time here.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Erik Johansen,

quote:

Thanks Dianthus for those links- makes for interesting reading!

I'm interested in that sort of thing too. I did an English degree at Loughborough University as a mature student (I was 40 when I started it) from 1990-1993 and opted for Mediaeval Literature and also Linguistics because I love words themselves as well as what people do with them .

quote:

I somehow have managed to make this topic slide Viking-ward, sorry about that!

That's OK - you should see how they hijack threads on the other forums I belong to (my screen name there is Sunflowers) !

quote:

At least they're a people worthy of study, the greatest seafarers of their day and a people who left their mark certainly in the place-names in Northern England. Travel across Yorkshire and you can see many reminders of their time here.

Definitely - especially in place names and a lot of the dialect forms. As I said before, my ex-husband was in the RAF and he came from your neck of the woods and I spent a lot of time in Lincolnshire and East Anglia and he used to drag me on hiking holidays across Yorkshire, the Dales and the Lake District, so I know quite a bit about the various Scandinavian tribes who left their mark there .

quote:

I somehow have managed to make this topic slide Viking-ward, sorry about that!

Oh, never worry about that, Erik. That's what makes a great thread. We had one on "wives" once that went on forever!

You'll have to consider coming to our Wordcraft Convention in October in Birmingham. We'll have good beer there!