I have a question: I’m reading an ARC set in, I believe, the Regency or close to it, and I’m confused about linguistics.
When did the American English dialect and pronunciation remove itself from any similarity to British English such that Englishmen might complain about an American woman’s “grating accent?”
Wikipedia puts the split at about 1725 so it would make sense that a book set in the Regency or shortly before or thereafter could conceivably feature remarks to linguistic difference. Continued searches of the Wiki reveal that there’s plenty to say about the differences between Brit English and US English – and Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Scottish, Asian, Caribbean, South African, Liberian, and Jamaican English, but not a great deal of detail that I found about WHY and WHEN these differences occured.
It’s been many years since I studied the history of the English language, so I’m rusty on my history – and I’m not even sure we covered the why of the split, so maybe it’s another linguistic unknown, like the direct cause of the Great Vowel Shift.
So I could be wrong in thinking the dialectical difference might not be so great, and that a character could realistically complain about the way an American sounds when in a ballroom in London. And I’m not one of the historical sticklers who is going to pitch a fit about such things; I’m just curious.
But on a related note, it does make me wonder – have there been any historical misfits in your fiction? Or, things that you thought were wrong that turned out to be correct?
Americanisms would throw me off – a governess walking ‘two blocks’, or an English Lord asking for his ‘pants’. There’s a Julia Quinn book which begins with the heroine worrying that her younger brother isn’t going to graduate from Eton. It was such an odd use of the word that I spent the next chapter or two wondering if she was right, and the upper classes had used ‘graduate’ that way. Never checked it out.
Partly because Quinn can be a bit haphazard about British stuff, I was darkly suspicious of her use of the Royal Mail in the Regency – I’d a firm idea in my head that that was a Victorian idea – Penny Black & all that. I did actually check that, and she was right.
“Americanisms would throw me off – a governess walking ‘two blocks’”
That doesn’t sound like an Americanism to me. I was brought up somewhere in the UK where we had Georgian buildings, and we would walk or cycle ‘round the block’, because the buildings were in squares, with the front doors all facing outwards, and gardens at the back, so if you stayed on the pavement you could go all the way round, past all the front doors and come back to where you’d started. I looked up the OED and it says that ‘block’ can mean:
“A compact or connected mass of houses or buildings, with no intervening spaces; (esp. in U.S. and Canada) the quadrangular mass of buildings included between four streets, or two ‘avenues’ and two streets at right angles to them. b. A portion of a town or space of ground so bounded, whether occupied by buildings or not. orig. U.S.”
So a ‘block’ may have a different meaning in the US and Canada when referring to portions of town buildings, but we do have blocks in the UK. I’d imagine it’s not a word used so much in places where the town layout is different e.g. if there are long lines of terraced housing, or a jumble of medieval buildings.
I can only recall one I read that stuck in my mind as driving me up the wall and the book into the wall when I couldn’t get past page one.
Some Regency women had formed a “book club” as a facade for their feminist detective agency. This wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that they were “reading” a certain novel by “Miss Jane Austen” which wasn’t published until two or three years after the book took place, and when it was, wasn’t published under Austen’s own name, rather it was published anonymously as “a novel by a lady.”
I’m just enough of an Austen nerd to have that bug the shit out of me.
And the cover-art was completely off and didn’t look a think like the characters or their time-period (why hello Scarlett O’Hara! May I introduce your contemporary Lizzie Bennet?) but that certainly hasn’t been the first time nor will it be the last that a bad cover has been the icing on a bad, bad cake of fiction.
Laura – I’m in two minds about that. I’ve certainly heard the phrase -‘round the block’ though probably mostly in the context ‘she’s been around the block a few times.’
And now I’m wondering where that phrase originates… Block of housing, butcher’s block, blockade? What block, and why does circumnavigating it leave you worldly wise?
Nonetheless, to get back to the point, I’d accept the word ‘block’ – it’s block as a measurement of distance that I’d quibble at. To me, half a mile, round the corner, hundred yards, would be natural ways of describing the distance between one place and another. I’ve not only never been told ‘it’s two blocks away’ but it wouldn’t convey anything to me if I was: I’ve no mental construct of how far a block might be.
The term always made sense to me as something that arose out of the nature of planned cities. I’d always read it as an Americanism – though I’ve been wrong about many things, and I’ve no specialist knowledge about this.
“Nonetheless, to get back to the point, I’d accept the word ‘block’ – it’s block as a measurement of distance that I’d quibble at.”
I agree, Marianne. FWIW, the ‘round the block’ phrase originates from when borstals or the National Service between the ‘40s and the ‘70s were at its peak.
That is the answer given to a caller’s enquiry on a Radio 4 history programme a few years ago. IIRC, Sue Cook was a presenter at the time. Hm. Oh, I’ve just googled: it’s ‘Making History’(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/index.shtml)
I can’t remember why it’s associated with borstals or the National Service. Maybe it’s something to do with those boys having to run round a field or such as a punishment? Hm, I think so because sometimes we say “You’re driving me round the block” or “I feel so tired that I feel I did a few runs round the block”. Maybe it evolved to what it means today: a short walking distance area between point A and point B, and it’s usually round a corner.
For it to be used as a measurement of distance, e.g. ‘It’s two blocks away’, I’m with Marianne here – it’s an Americanism, IMO.
i was told growing up that 12 blocks was a mile. Grew up in a western canadian city.
I remember hearing a quote in a PBS documentary from an Englishman traveling in America a decade or so before the Revolution, something to the effect that New Englanders spoke English very well except for seeming nasal. I suppose it wouldn’t be beyond the level of suspension of disbelief for somebody to find that nasality unpleasant.
Historical misfits I’ve seen? Ancient Greeks celebrating Beltaine. That’s the wrong set of European pagans.
Umm. I don’t know. I was raised by Yankee parents in Mississippi, and I haven’t got a southern accent. I can put one on easily, and when I’m drunk or extremely tired I can sound very southern, but by and large, I’d say it’s not necessarily peers who set your accent. Parents with strong opinions about their children’s speech patterns and the temerity to withold cookies for a week just because said child let one “Don’t be hateful, now!” slip out can set your accent quite well. 🙂 If said character spent most of his formative years with his mother, she valued her own French upbringing and wanted her son to feel French as well, and his nanny wasn’t quite so watchful when he wasn’t in the nursery with her, his natural accent could have been French—because that’s how he learned to speak with his mother. My primary accent is what they call “Broadcast Midwestern” because I’ve been taught to be very careful with pronunciation. My peers in grade school would have laughed themselves sick to hear me speak as I do now!
Although I do spread my “I” out to “Ah” when I’m speaking very quickly. So I guess there’s some props to the theory there.
Think I’ve gone beyond my former state of incoherent historical rage and into quiet acceptance about the historicity in fiction issue. These days, I just pretend it’s set in an alternate universe. That’s not to say I don’t love a really well-written, well-researched piece of historical fiction. When I do find it, or at least a very good imitation, I bounce up and down like a fruitcake on a trampoline and investigate for potential purchase just about everything the author’s written.
But if the author plays to other strengths, that’s enough to sustain me. For me, it’s more important that a book is internally consistent. That’s not to say I won’t occasionally double-take or even let out a snotty, “Oh please” on occasion, and if the abused detail is critical to the plot then it might tip the balance in certain cases. But I won’t let it spoil an otherwise good book. Frankly, if a writer’s got that spark of magic then I’m not really thinking about the mechanics.
So much of history is unknown and uncertain. As the OED discussion in this thread shows, interpretation is often more about what’s probable, than what is actually confirmed truth. And someone’s bound to disprove this or re-evaluate the evidence at some point. At other times evidence can contradict received wisdom. This is where a good historical writer can really shine through. But given the other unlikely aspects of many romance novels, I’m not going to cavil at the odd slip-up.
All this goes with the caveat that no one talks about how “historically accurate” a book is. For that, I want footnotes and references dammit, and I will pick the nits out of that freshly-conditioned, unpowdered hair with a vengeance. Otherwise I treat oddities as signifiers. If velvet is used before velvet was invented, then I just use it as shorthand for “insert most luxurious fabric of the time here”.
For me, the problem is when historical sloppiness is reflected in general sloppiness. I take the whole as a lack of respect for me as a reader. So while I might not be bothered about a heroine skipping around in her medieval satin hot pants, it will be added to the pile featuring editing issues, silly accents, stereotyped characters and annoyingly precocious children wallowing in muddy plot holes until the weight of it all is overwhelming and I just give up and go watch something about mackerel migrations.
Added to this is the annoyance I feel when the same plots are endlessly recycled in the name of a historical reality that never existed.
I think good historical fiction is a kind of illusion. If I want good historical fact, I’ll read non-fiction. It may be a load of tripe too, since not all history is created equal, but at least I’ll get more satisfaction out of the argument.
Ummm… and since I’m on a roll this evening, about the dialect thing? I desperately want to dig out David Crystal on this, but he’s in storage. (y’know – linguist-in-a-cupboard – for all those tricky lexical situations). I do recall him arguing very covincingly that everyone in Britain had regional accents until the last century or two, when one dialect came to dominate as “standard” but can’t remember the details too well.
People’s opinion about a particular accent isn’t impartial – it’s based on a host of cultural associations and perceptions of others, as well as individual personalities. That’s where I might also raise an eyebrow at the description Sarah quoted, although it would be interesting to hear the context. I mean, “grating” is more judgemental than descriptive about the accent in question. “Grating accent” could be about the person being marked as not belonging to another culture because of their different speech patterns.
But no two people pronouce things exactly the same, and “accent” itself used to be used as a synonym for voice/speech rather than regional or other pronounciation (as in, “in accents low”). So it could just be a reflection of the view of an individual or their own idiosyncrasies. That’s how I might argue myself into a corner and just vote for the alternate universe.
Another thing that relates to this is that the Bennet sisters were more likely to have had Hampshire accents than the smooth RP vowels of most screen adaptations. But if Hampshire accents (and how would this be recreated anyhow, since speech and dialect change more rapidly than written language?) were used in the name of authenticity, it’s not possible to escape the fact that this accent likely has a very different set of cultural associations for modern listeners.
So is it better to aim for the effect that JA was apparently intending, or go for what academics argue is the more authentic speech pattern? IMHO, there’s merit in both as long as people are aware that neither is or was reality, strictly speaking.
And where does this leave people whose accents change after suffering a brain injury?
I don’t know if others mentioned it before, but this all reminds me of the movie A Knight’s Tale. Some couldn’t believe the creators would “despoil” a perfectly good medieval movie with David Bowie music and modern themes. But the director had argued that folks during that time were just like us, that the language would’ve felt alive and truncated in all kinds of little bits and been wildly different from one person to the next. It made sense to me and not that I want to excuse lazy authors who won’t bother with some obvious details, I still think a good story will save the day even if some of the historical bits make me go “Rhuh?”
Plus, who the hell knows how folks *really* talked and behaved during, say, the Middle Ages. I prefer to read a good story with goofed-up historical details than a bad story with incredibly researched history. *makes me wanna yawn already*
EvilAuntiePeril: And where does this leave people whose accents change after suffering a brain injury?
Or someone like Madonna, whose accent has spontaneously … evolved … over time?
I read a historical where the character said, “Whatever.” As in dad says, “You will marry this person.” Daughter responds, “Whatever.” That’s the only one I’m coming up with right now.
Nothing to add here, except: MAILI, YOU’RE BAAAAACK!
First: did you know that if you mistype the word in the box, you are punished? Your whole carefully composed comment is destroyed.
So once again, briefly this time:
Rather than be rude and hijack this already very interesting discussion with my usual stuff on accent, I’ve done that on my weblog, today’s entry.
Parents with strong opinions about their children’s speech patterns and the temerity to withold cookies for a week just because said child let one “Don’t be hateful, now!†slip out can set your accent quite well.
I hear you Kaite. I grew up in Boston with two parents who essentially have that bland “midland” accent. We were NOT allowed to have brawd Bahstin accents. No seh, feh sure.
And “Wicked!” as in “Wicked Awesome!” was considered a swear word of the highest rank.
Funny now to hear them say how much they enjoyed Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon et al., in “The Departed”.
But, Ma!
My head hurts too much to even think about it. But I imagine the Brits have always complained about the way Americans use their language…if only because it gave them something to do.
Actually during my research into England(am planning on studying/working abroad), an American accent is admired by the English because it denotes prosperity and wealth—of all things!
an American accent is admired by the English because it denotes prosperity and wealth—of all things!
Shay, was this research you conducted yourself? I wouldn’t want to suggest that English people don’t associate American accents with wealth, but I wonder whether, if you carried out the research, and you have an American accent, the respondents might, out of politeness, not mention any negative connotations that an American accent has for them?
The associations with wealth are quite understandable, since we are probably most likely to see Americans in the context of popular music (e.g. Madonna, Britney Spears), TV/film (e.g. Dallas, Sex and the City), politics (e.g. George Bush) and business (e.g. Bill Gates, Donald Trump). When Americans are tourists they’ve got leisure time and are spending money, which may lead people to assume that they’re rich.
Laura V. wrote: “When Americans are tourists they’ve got leisure time and are spending money, which may lead people to assume that they’re rich.”
My own experience has been this: When I browse silently in English antique shops, dealers go on chatting with their chums or reading the newspaper. But once they’ve heard me speak—in my nasal American tones—they hurry from around the counter & make a concerted effort to sell me everything in the shop. I think I’d do much better on prices if I pretended to be a deaf-mute & let my British companions do all the talking for me. (I believe there’s a good living to be made from American tourists.)
Also, I discovered repeatedly that, if you don’t have a southern drawl, or sound as if you grew up in the New York outer boroughs, or if you don’t use any slang favored by California teenagers, then the British will pay you the great ccompliment of saying: “You sounded rather like a Canadian. I thought at first you might be from Canada.”
Oddly, if you have an accent like mine (or most of my peers – count me as someone who doesn’t have an accent like either parent), which is standard middle-class English with a vague regional twang, then some Canadians and Americans assume I’m from New Zealand or Ireland. No one tries to sell me antiques, though, just shoes, CDs and clothes at cost.
Also, brain being what it is, in a previous comment I wrote “plot”. This is because I’m an idiot. I really meant recycled plot devices/stereotypes.
I took a quiz that told me I have no accent at all and that I’d make a good news presenter.
My husband is English and has lived in the Midwest for nine years. Last month, a woman asked him whether he was from NZ or Australia because “she’d lived in England for a while amongst Kiwis.” Apparently she’d spent more time with the Kiwis than with the natives. Or else the Midwest has done seriously unnatural things to his accent. Time to take him home for a recharge.
When I lived in England for a year, I intentionally softened my nasal twang because I hated being pegged for an American. People did treat me differently—more casually—when they assumed I was English. Sometimes I just wanted to buy bread and not have to go into how I was an exchange student yada yada. And luckily, I am not Madonna so no one except my mom really noticed the change. By the time Keven and I were engaged, his extended family did not believe I was American—especially, they said, because I have imperfect teeth and I’m not particularly loud.
I softened my accent on purpose when I was an exchange student in the British Isles too!! Well, half on purpose—I’m such an accent sponge I can’t avoid adopting bits of people’s accents. You should’ve heard me during my sister’s wedding to a Mississippi boy—I couldn’t stop saying “y’all.”
But I did soften some of the really harsh American vowels on purpose, in situations like bars, where I just didn’t want to attract attention and just wanted to be one of the group.
But whenever I phoned home my mom would spend the first minute and a half laughing at my accent.
However, unlike some people I know, I didn’t artificially hang onto the modified accent once I came home, like having spent ten months in the British Isles was going to make me pseudo-British for life… Although I still go a bit British when I’m really drunk and obstreporous.
At the moment I have trouble not having a Canadian accent because I work at an airport right near the border and most of my customers are Canadians. Ticky-boo, eh? Soh-rry aboot that!
I think the upshot of this thread is that most of the more subtle historical accuracy stuff is what you make of it. I’m writing a historical at the moment and I’m mostly trying to focus on not throwing anything in there that’s not going to help the story. There’s a tendency toward unevenness—talking too much about things I’ve researched, and glossing over things I haven’t.
I’ve seen extant examples of velvet dating back to the 16th century (both cut and uncut), in a variety of fibers (wool, silk, linen). And by then there was a thriving silk industry in Italy which was producing various qualities of silk (which would still have been for wealthy merchants on up, but it wasn’t like only nobles could afford silk).
I’m with you on the stupidity of a silk chemise (hello, the whole point of a chemise is that it’s easily laundered, which we all know silk isn’t; esp when combined with the caustic soap used in by the laundresses of the past). And pretty much ALL heroines from the Tudor era through the Edwardian era (INCLUDING those of the Regency) should be wearing their pair of bodies, stays, or corset.
I despise people who assume that I’m an inbred hillbilly just because I use “y’all” and draw out my vowels. I’ve never had anyone say specifically that they hate my accent, but I have been treated differently by people, including my own family members from the northeast.
For the most part, people think that it can be “charming” and there are times when it really and truly is better to be underestimated.
The one thing that I discovered in my 20s (I hadn’t left the south since I hit puberty) is that men LOVE my accent. Particularly the men from overseas. Throw a “sugar” and a “baby” in the conversation and I could have anything that I wanted. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was calling them that because I couldn’t remember their names.
At the same time, I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try. I feel like an absolute fool, and I have a hard time admitting that I can’t understand the same damn language that I tend to butcher in new and exciting ways everyday. I don’t find the accent offensive or anything, I just can’t understand their inflections.
I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.
I’m always amazed by this, but it’s not uncommon. I recently attended a workshop given by a German woman who speaks VERY clear English with a lovely English accent. No less than three people out of the twenty attendees said afterwards they couldn’t understand a word she said! And when I attended college in VA (note I’m from CA) tons of people had trouble understanding me.
You’re dead right about the Southern accent getting men to do what you want. LOL! If I tell a guy, “I’m sorry, but you can’t stand there, you’re blocking the cocktail waitresses.†He’ll get mad. But if I put on the Georgia drawl I learned from my friends in college and say the same thing he’ll trip over himself to move.
Try this one on for a picky linguistic center: I can’t understand a Liverpool accent. Paul McCartney is about the outer limits of my understanding, and he’s pretty much BBC standard anymore. George Harrison? Only when he was singing. When I lived in London, my lands were a very nice guy from Liverpool and his Irish wife. If I needed something, I had to ask her because I always got a headache when he spoke—I just couldn’t understand him at all. I swear, it didn’t even sound like English!
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t putting me on or something. Although why would he? And I’ve worked for a Taiwanese professor whose friends (mostly mainland Chinese) couldn’t speak but two words of English and I understood them fine! So what up with that?
The saddest part of that whole trip was my American Studies prof—he was just so studly I (and probably the other females in that class; hmm, it was largely female) wanted to throw him down behind his desk and do unmentionable things to his delicious person. He sounded exactly, EXACTLY like Scrooge McDuck. I think I’m emotionally scarred for life! 😆
Laura: To us, cajones are really big boxes. 🙂
I speak English with a Cuban/Miami accent, although at some point I must have lost the Cuban part ‘cause one of my professors thought I’d been born in Miami. Now I live in Alabama, where some of the y’alls and the drawl have started to stick, and the Cuban accent has returned.
I also speak a little bit of Russian, so sometimes there are three different languages and three/four inflections trying to come out. When that happens I have to compose the entire sentence in my head and then hope it comes out ok.
About children learning accents, etc from their parents: When I lived in Spain one summer there was this guy who surprised the heck out of me when he switched from Castilian Spanish to Aussie-accented English. It turns out his dad was Australian, and he’d been the one who practiced English with him. They learned English in school, and the other students’ was Spanish accented.
Maia
Maia, my Spanish is Castilian Spanish, which probably accounts for why I’d think of ‘cajones’ as having a different meaning. When I was at university I came across varieties of Latin American Spanish for the first time, and sometimes it was very different from what I was used to (and, of course, it varied depending on which part of Latin America the texts came from). The verb ‘coger’ has a whole different meaning in Argentina, for example. Is it rude in other parts of Latin America too?
I discovered that I absolutely can NOT understand an Irish accent no matter how hard I try.
OMG, this brings back memories! Eight months in Ireland and half of the time I couldn’t tell whether the people were talking English or Irish! One day I met this boy outside our student accomodation and (I swear!) he asked me “Howdediddledoo?” Poor guy, after the third repitition he got a bit cranky … (But I still didn’t have the foggiest clue what he was saying.)
I recently attended a workshop given by a German woman who speaks VERY clear English with a lovely English accent. No less than three people out of the twenty attendees said afterwards they couldn’t understand a word she said!
As long as they didn’t interrupt the workshop every 10 minutes with shouts of “WHAT did you say??? Your English is sooo strange!”
Maybe I find Irish accents easy cause I live in San Francisco and the streets (and bars!) are lousy with Irishmen (in a good way *wink*).
I think the only accent that ever stumped me was Glaswegian, and my friends from Edinburgh assured me that they can’t understand Glaswegians half the time either. LOL! And it was just one guy, I could understand all his friends.
I’m English, from the UK, never lived anywhere else. My accent is North-West, Lancashire, but I can talk posh if I need to – most people here can. Tony Blair has an “Estuary” accent, to give you an idea.
Having posted my credentials, there is one word that tells everyone outside the US that the historical novel is written by an American.
They are commonly known as “gotten books,” because ‘gotten’ is the word. I’ve got into long and boring discussions with people who refuse to believe it, but it’s true. After the 16th century, “gotten” was used rarely, if at all. A book peppered with them tends to scream “American.”
But that won’t stop me reading a good book. When I start to get bored with a book, I start looking for the reasons why. Gobs of backstory, stereotypical characters, unbelievable plots and lack of attention to historical detail will all do it. As will all that “telling not showing.”
So it’s a combination of things.
gotten
Can you use that in a sentence?
Do you mean “He’d gotten the book from her.†rather than “He’d received the book from her.� *shudder* That use makes this American queasy. Do you see this a lot?
re: Spanish – I learned Castilian Spanish as an exchange student (twice- when I was 15 and when I was 21) and have noticed that I have a MUCH easier time understanding Spaniards, Cubans, and to some degree, Portuguese and Brazilian speakers of Spanish than I do Spanish speakers from most countries in Central and South America.
I thought my Spanish ability was slipping because I speak mostly in Spanish with people from Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, and I had a terrible time understanding them when they spoke what I call “full speed Spanish.” It wasn’t until I found a Castilian Spanish podcast that I felt better. I still wish I understood the Central and South Americans better but at least it’s a question of training my ear, not re-training my language-learning brain cells!
“gotten
Can you use that in a sentence?
Do you mean “He’d gotten the book from her.†rather than “He’d received the book from her.â€? *shudder* That use makes this American queasy. Do you see this a lot? “
No, you’d say “He got the book from her.” Or avoid the word altogether, and say, “He had the book from her” or something a bit nicer. Try to make it work on both sides of the Atlantic!
Sorry, my editor is slapping my wrist for using “had” too much, so I’m getting rid of them whenever I can.
I know this doesn’t apply to language but it was very annoying all the same.
I recently read a story where the heroine was in Las Vegas IN JULY and bought a velvet dress for a night out on the town.
I was there this past July and it was 112 degrees!
Ah, crimes of fashion . . . how many films have we all seen where characters are supposedly running about San Francisco but are dressed for a day in LA? Too many. When I see the girl in the tank top and shorts I shake my head and grin over how sorry she’d really be come 5pm when the fog rolls in.
Two words in historicals that make me think, but are usually correct: electric and plastic!