WHAT DID THE FOUNDING FATHERS SOUND LIKE? (Not that different from you really.)

WHAT DID THE FOUNDING FATHERS SOUND LIKE?

(Not that different from you really.)

Um. Well, you know, this is one of those questions of degree of precision. And I’m going to answer in my best degree of precision.

But let’s get a few things straight.

1) “Faggy British English Pronunciation” is a fabrication of the 19th century, just like “Faggy french court pronunciation” is a total fabrication of the 17/18th. We have records of the transformation, and how and why it was done. (signaling). Americans tried ‘Mid Atlantic’ pronunciation for the same reasons in the early 20th century.

2) If you listen to a middle class Scott, (not working class) it is about as accurate a living example of the common ancestor of British and American English pronunciation. I would venture that your ability to distinguish one of the founding fathers from an educated scott would be limited to the degree of “rhrotic?” (pronunciation of the ‘r’ sound). There is an archive online of world accents. In at least germanic languages, as intelligence, class, and status increases, people substitute articulate vocabulary for melodic loading, and soften the ‘hard’ sounds. Languages evolve under urban use along predictable lines.

3) As I’ve stated before, as far as I know, the Germans, making the majority of the white population, principally farmers, probably caused a further flattening of tonality. And it’s this flattened tonality, that affected the original ‘scotts/irish’ (or what is really old english) pronunciation.

4) Americans sound a lot more like founding fathers than the brits do. Our language is changing very fast right now as well.

5) I am not sure how southern drawl evolved from and I haven’t looked at it in any depth. My undrestanding is that the settlers were from the lower classes and it evolved from that where the more northern peoples tended to be from the middle, upper middle and upper classes and their language evolved from that. I can’t really say anything better informed.

I would love to be corrected but this is the state of my knowledge.