[Ads-l] Accents of the Civil War

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Mar 13 16:17:46 UTC 2021


Here's someone else from the 1860s - or possibly early '70s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN-p98lYOnQ

JL

On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 7:01 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> This fifteen-minute clip may be of interest to dialectologists, because the
> speaker was born in 1846.  He came from a wealthy family in southeastern
> Virginia.
>
> He may be enunciating for the microphone more carefully than usual:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfqIa4dDxrw
>
> This man was born in rural Minnesota in 1850.  Unfortunately the sound
> quality is very poor:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1tk1Qc4tN4
>
> These speakers (starting about 1:15 in) were only a few years younger.
> Their accents sound perfectly ordinary to me:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfcc21c6Uo
>
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfcc21c6Uo>
> The interesting question (which can't be answered from these clips) is how
> much U.S. accents have changed in the past 160 years. A lot? A little? If
> only a little, what about 100 years before that?
>
> The question is probably too broad to be answered.
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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