18c accents?

[Mark A Mandel]

My wife has posed me a question I'm unable to answer: When did American
pronunciation start becoming noticeably different from English
pronunciation? E.g., is there any record from around the time of the
American Revolution ("colonials speak oddly" sort of thing)?

She was prompted to this question by listening to the CDs in a book
called _Poetry Speaks_, featuring American and English poets reading
their own works. The oldest are from circa 1888: Tennyson, Browning, and
Whitman. T & B are, she says, "obviously British", though B, who
traveled extensively in the US, is "less so". But Whitman "pretty much
sounds the way you'd expect an educated mid-Atlantic person to sound;
it's clearly not British, but an American accent, and pretty much the
same you'd expect to hear today."

She also comments that while it's very difficult to make out *what*
they're saying -- the originals were on wax cylinders -- the accent and
cadence are clearly distinguishable. I haven't listened to these yet.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguist at Large