Chirac warns of 'catastrophe' of world 'choked' by US values

[JohnT]

Btw, Elephant is a great movie. I recommend it highly.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Well, Boorstin says so, and he's a leading scholar of colonial history, and this book (well, a few chapters of it, but I read the whole thing) is part of my high school US history curriculum, so...

Ah, you misunderstood.

I'm not doubting the veracity of the claim, I just want to know how they figured it out.

[Kuciwalker]

That's an interesting question. I assume it's possible to trace the evolution of the pronunciation of a language, and one way to have done it in this case would be to look at how American English (which started off as just London and Midlands English, since that's where most of the colonists came from) had evolved, and trace that back to the colonial times.

[Sandman]

Southern Americans certainly sound out all their syllables, y'all.

[Kuciwalker]

They do so far more than the Englishmen of the time did (or even now, in many cases).

[Sandman]

Matter of opinion.

[Last Conformist]

The history of pronunciation can, to a certain degree of certainty, be infered by the traces it leaves in writing - misspellings, rhymes, meter. And then there's internal reconstruction, older loans in other languages, the occasional explicit statement by old authors, and the odd help from good ol'-fashioned comparative linguistics.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Sandman
Matter of opinion.

Not at all. For instance, due mostly to the manner in which reading is taugh (sounding out all syllables) in America, we pronounce every syllable in something like secretary, whereas the English almost always omit it - secret'ry, explanat'ry, laborat'ry - and they have continued to drop syllables in pronunciation, whereas American pronunciation is relatively conservative. (btw, "ain't" comes from the upper circles of seventeenth century England, it is not a Souther invention). Then look at names like Gloucester and Worcester - no one in America would think of spelling things that way.

[Dauphin]

Do you consider the way a word is spelt as being the correct way to pronounce them?

S'pose suppose was spelt spose? Or say Gloucester was spelt Gloster?

Sounding out syllables, to me, seems more of an invention of the way words are defined as spelt, which often has no relation to the way they are pronounced in the vernacular.

[Dauphin]

That is to say for example, is the American way of saying 'Lie-sest-er' better than the English way of saying 'Lesster', when discussing Leicester?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Dauphin
Do you consider the way a word is spelt as being the correct way to pronounce them?

Generally, yes.

S'pose suppose was spelt spose?

People are taught to say suppose (here); it's just most get the bad habit of saying spose

Or say Gloucester was spelt Gloster?

It used to be, actually, and that would make more sense.

Sounding out syllables, to me, seems more of an invention of the way words are defined as spelt, which often has no relation to the way they are pronounced in the vernacular.

That's exactly what it is. Learning to read by sounding out syllables was an American invention which ended up changing pronunciation so that it actually followed the syllables.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Dauphin
That is to say for example, is the American way of saying 'Lie-sest-er' better than the English way of saying 'Lesster', when discussing Leicester?

Personally, yes, though there obviously isn't any real objective standard. However, remember, I'm referring a lot to what the people then thought.

[Dauphin]

I don't really care what the aristocratics then thought. They thought white people were better than blacks or yellows etc...

[Kuciwalker]

You don't think they are?

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
That's exactly what it is. Learning to read by sounding out syllables was an American invention which ended up changing pronunciation so that it actually followed the syllables.

Nitpick: Syllables refer to pronunciation. What happened was extra syllables being inserted to match spelling.

All due to bizarre anglophone conservativism wrt spelling, BTW.