18c accents?

[Beverly Flanigan]

And don't forget Albert Marckwardt's "The Language of the Colonists,"
reprinted in _The Play of Language_, ed. L. Dean et al. (Oxford UP, 1971).

At 12:18 PM 2/8/02 -0500, you wrote:
>Those interested in American English of the colonial period may wish to
>look at Mitford Mathews' *The Beginnings of American English*, originally
>published by U of Chicago Press in 1931.  It reprints early commentary from
>the likes of John Witherspoon, Noah Webster, Anne Royall, and
>others.  Another good source is Fisher and Bornstein's *In Forme of Speche
>is Chaunge* (orig. Prentice Hall 1974, later Univ Press of America;  there
>is also a Caedmon LP with audio to match parts of the book), which has a
>whole section on colonial American English.  More recently, Vol. VI
>"English in North America" of *The Cambridge History of the English
>Language* contains some good summary information about colonial American
>settlement and language (though it sections are perhaps more dependent on
>David Fischer's *Albion's Seed* than need be, a work which gives more
>credit to localizable British origins of the settlers than some other
>historicans, such as Bernard Bailyn).
>
>John Smith, about as early as you'd want to get, published vocabulary from
>contacts with Native Americans, some of which survives today.  We hear from
>Witherspoon that there were already American English variants in the 18th
>century. Anne Royall was representing characteristic regional American
>pronunciations (in "literary dialect") in the early 19th century. Before
>that we see spellings in early colonial documents that suggest the various
>pronunciations then in use. Early records, say, the Salem Witch Trials
>(there is a Web site at U of Virginia for texts), recapitulate spellings
>used in England--immigrants of course brought their various dialect
>features with them--but it isn't long before we see some differences
>emerging as the native-born population grew.  The best evidence for the
>timing of the emergence of accents may be what happened in the later 19th
>century in New Zealand, where what Peter Trudgill calls "embryonic
>variants" of the later-characteristic New Zealand accent could be
>identified in the first and second generations of native New
>Zealanders.  We can surmise, therefore, based on the written evidence and
>the example of New Zealand, that there were growing regional American
>accents as early as the end of the 17th century, and that such accents
>became so well established during the 18th c that they could be pilloried
>in dialect writing by about 1800.
>
>Bill
>
>
>At 10:16 PM 2/3/02 -0500, you wrote:
> >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
>
>Bill Kretzschmar                        Professor of English and Linguistics
>Dept. of English                        Phone: 706-542-2246
>University of Georgia                   Fax:  706-583-0027
>Athens, GA  30602-6205                  Atlas Web Site: us.english.uga.edu
>
>Bill Kretzschmar                        Professor of English and Linguistics
>Dept. of English                        Phone: 706-542-2246
>University of Georgia                   Fax:  706-583-0027
>Athens, GA  30602-6205                  Atlas Web Site: us.english.uga.edu


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm