The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Jun 10 01:32:36 UTC 2010
At 5:57 PM -0700 6/9/10, David Wake wrote:
>Sheridan, writing in 1762, said that R-dropping was found only in
>northern English provincial speech. It doesn't seem to have become
>firmly established in the prestige accent of England until the
>beginning of the nineteenth century, and I would imagine that it was
>not imported into US Northeastern and Southern prestige accents until
>still later.
>
>David
OK, good to know. So it's actually more the British accents (like
that of King George) that are off rather than the New England ones.
I wonder if there mightn't have been other salient differences
between the dialects of Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston at the
time of the Revolution, though. I was under the impression that the
differences in (what would turn into) U.S. regional accents were
already distinguished by 1800, based on different settlement patterns
of those regions.
LH
>
>On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject: Re: The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> At 6:13 PM -0500 6/9/10, Dan Goodman wrote:
> >>David Wake wrote:
>>>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>>>-----------------------
>>>>Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>>Poster: David Wake <dwake at STANFORDALUMNI.ORG>
>>>>Subject: Re: The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"
>>>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>>Many Brits assume that "Maryland" is pronounced as though it were two
>>>>words "Mary Land", with successive SQUARE, happY and TRAP vowels
>>>>(with the last syllable having secondary stress). Since Brits havecx
>>>>split Mary/marry/merry, this sounds very different from the actual
>>>>pronunciation to be heard from Maryland natives.
> >>>
>>>Did Brits (and Americans who pronounce two or all of these differently)
>>>split the sound, or did people who pronounce them all the same merge them?
>>>
>> Reminds me: I've been watching the video series of "John Adams"
>> originally from HBO (based on McCullough's biography) and while I've
>> been enjoying it, I've also been bothered by the apparent working
>> assumption that all the Americans, from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania
>> to Georgia spoke "American", quite distinct in their pronunciation
>> from the British. I'd have thought they might have tried a bit
>> harder to represent New Englanders as speaking a bit more like the
>> British, or at least like 20th century New Englanders (well,
>> actually, Laura Linney as Abigail Adams isn't too far off in that
>> respect), the southerners like, well, southerners, and only the
>> Pennsylvanians (and neighbors) speaking rhotically. Is my guess
>> about what Americans would have sounded like in the 1770s-1790s that
>> far off? Would Washington and Jefferson really have sounded pretty
>> much like Adams, and ditto Hamilton? Maybe they just thought it was
>> easier both for the actors and for the viewers who were supposed to
>> tell the good (American) guys from the bad Brits.
>>
>> LH
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
More information about the Ads-l
mailing list