Bill, if you knew more about the history of the English language, its accents, dialects and vocabulary, you would realize that in many cases it was the British who âbastardizedâ English, if you want to use that word, and the Americans who have faithfully retained older forms and pronunciations.
In the first place, nobody on earth speaks the âoriginal Englishâ anymore, so the English spoken by the British today is not any more original than what Americans speak.
The accent that is accepted worldwide as a âproperâ British accent (the accent of British aristocracy, of traditional BBC announcers, etc.) is actually an innovation that did not happen to spread beyond the east coast of the United States. In other words, my Michigan accent is centuries older than Queen Elizabethâs, so if the age of the dialect is the measure of correctness, I speak more âcorrectlyâ than she does. After all, why do you people write the letter R in words like âfarâ and âhorseâ if you donât pronounce it? Because it used to be there, of course, but in âlazyâ British speech, they started to drop it off.
As for the purported âIâve got a pebble in my mouthâ manner of speech (usually characterized by German-speaking English teachers as a potato, instead of a pebble), if the Americans speak sloppily, what is one to say about most of the population of London, who canât be bothered to stick their tongues forward to pronounce a proper T in the middle of a word? In the US, that gets a kid sent to speech therapy. Or the many British who finish words ending in a /u/ sound as if they ended in /i/, so all over London you hear the word âthroughâ sounding like âthröeeâ or âdoâ sounding like âdöeeâ. Whatâs that all about? Is that correct, proper, original English?
And as for âoriginalâ spellings, I think youâd better look at a bunch British documents from the 14th century or so. It appears the âoriginalâ way to spell English was any way you wanted to. The original spelling of âthroughâ, 1,000 years ago, was âÏžurhâ. I donât think the British write it that way anymore either.
Americans donât generally talk about âAmerican Englishâ, but most of the time about âEnglishâ. The term âAmerican Englishâ is generally used to refer only to variants that exist on the American continent, or by Europeans to express resentment for the United States. Or by incompetent foreign English teachers as a way to rationalize their ineptness.
I think that before you go off on a rant about this again, youâd better get an education in historical linguistics and dialectology. Your post contained essentially nothing thatâs factually true, but did expose your own bigotry to a great degree. You know, just because someone speaks English and is literate, it doesnât mean that they actually know anything about its origins and development. You had a lot of folk tales in your post.
Had America not bastardised the English language, then these problems would never have arisen.
