Word of the Day. Post it Here

I didn't mean to imply that it was hated. Merely that it was an artificial creation, and it's not usually very easy to get people to accept something like that. After all, the whole point was to create an accent that would instantly identify members of the "upper class," as democratization and the attrition of the aristocracy made them more difficult to identify by appearance--no footmen, for example.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

However, its appearance coincided with the dawn of the Electronic Age, and every language community needs a standard dialect (or at least accent) that everyone can understand easily. In America it was developed gradually. The national network radio (and later TV) studios were in Hollywood and New York City, so the population heard announcers speaking with California and New York accents, which aren't very different. Eventually the minor differences were leveled and that became Standard American English.

In England they just took RP because it already had the advantage of being a non-regional, relatively "neutral" accent/dialect that everyone could understand without much effort. In the early days it was often called "Oxford English," especially by Americans, because it was introduced to the country by teaching it to upper-class children in their private schools, which are confusingly called "public schools" over there. But now we call it "BBC English" because it's used in all the broadcasts.

It has changed over the decades. If you listen to a speech by Queen Elizabeth early in her reign and compare it to the way she talks today, it almost sounds like a different person. We notice the difference over here; back in the 1950s I found it almost impossible to understand the dialog in a British movie. Today it's easy. Some of that is of course the result of the British Invasion in rock'n'roll, hearing the Beatles and Herman's Hermits on the radio every day, and popular TV shows like Monty Python and Upstairs Downstairs. We got used to it so it's easier to understand. But even John Cleese and Eric Idle don't talk quite the same as they did forty years ago.

That's an issue we don't know about on this side of the Whaleroad.

 

Of course. In fact if you travel far enough westward in Germany you encounter dialects that could just as easily be called dialects of Dutch. The same is true of the areas where Czech and Slovak, or Spanish and Catalan, or Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian meet. The nature of a dialect continuum is such that neighbors can understand each other, but not necessarily the folks at the ends of the continuum.

But not among our sophisticated members.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

We all are aware of the much greater differences among the dialects in the U.K. Since radio and TV began exerting their leveling influence, the differences in American speech are really only accents (pronunciation) rather than dialects (vocabulary and/or grammar).

But when I was a kid in the 1950s, I found Southern American dialect very difficult to understand. And British, of course, was impenetrabale.

Which is why accents survive. China is the most outrageous example of this phenomenon. Since its writing system is not phonetic, regional accents kept diverging to the point that they are no longer even slightly intercomprehensible. Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghai, Fujian, etc., are distinct languages, with the unique characteristic that they all use the same words in the same sequence (about 98% anyway) so they can all read each other's writing.

China is still working on that, with the populace kicking and screaming in protest. Mandarin is now taught in all schools, so in another couple of generations everyone in the country will at least understand it. At that point they'll be able to make the transition to the phonetic writing system that has already been developed--expect more kicking and screaming at that time.

I beg to differ about R.P. Wikipedia cites a typical reference at the time of its introduction:

. . . . Received Pronunciation was the "everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk [had] been educated at the great public boarding-schools" and which conveyed no information about that speaker's region of origin prior to attending the school.​

Note that it was indeed a leveler of region, but not of social class.

Standard Italian was synthesized primarily from the dialect of Florence, because it was considered the country's center of culture and education. Standard American is a synthesis of the accents of Hollywood and New York City, rather than Washington, the seat of government, or Boston, our self-appointed cultural leader. The reason of course is that Hollywood and New York were the locations of the radio and TV studios, and that's the language that all Americans have been hearing for three-quarters of a century.

 

* * * * NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR * * * *

Gustav has been banned for two weeks for the unnecessary and inappropriate language in Post #643. Please keep the discourse civil on this board. We all spout off once in a while, and of course on the Linguistics board we're free to discuss the etymology of curse words. But not to toss them around eight times in one post. Particularly when directed at the Moderator.

 

No, he is on every Moderator's radar. The reason I could give him a two-week ban is that he already has infractions from other Moderators and he was that far along in the ban cycle.

Nobody's going to get draconian on your hynie if you just pop out a few words, especially not without a couple of warnings first.

That's perfectly acceptable. We have hosted discussions of all the popular cusswords. Their etymologies are very interesting. Why is slang for defecation a venerable old Anglo-Saxon word that even goes back to Proto-Germanic, with cognates in almost all the other Germanic languages, whereas we had to borrow a slang word for urination from the French? Where did the F-word come from? It's not the oft-suggested acronym "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" because illiterate societies do not understand acronyms. (I didn't spell out the words because I'm posting through a corporate server, not because of any taboo.)

If you do, someone will politely tell you so, not reach straight for the Ban Stick. Gustav is a repeat offender. Not necessarily a specialist in profanity, but he has violated several of the website's rules and continued to do so without any attempt at reforming. When you have a rap sheet like that, cussing out a Moderator is not going to help your plea for leniency.

Feel free. But I doubt that it's a linguistics issue so it probably belongs under Biology, Human Science, History, or perhaps my other board Art & Culture.

The word is archetype, pronounced AR-kuh-type. In Jungian theory it's a motif (image, ritual, legend, fear, etc.) that occurs in nearly all cultures in nearly all eras. Jung died before genetics matured into a major science, but today we would say that an archetype is a set of synapses programmed into our brains by evolution. A type of instinct. Since something that we have "known" since birth feels more true than anything we learn later through reasoning and learning, archetypes are powerful. Many of them are survival behaviors that were passed down by natural selection since, for example, if an animal doesn't have the instinct to run away from a larger animal with both eyes in front of its face, it won't live long enough to mate and pass on its genes. But other archetypes may be accidental mutations that were lucky enough to be passed down through a genetic bottleneck or by genetic drift, and they may have no impact, or even a negative impact, on survival.

 

No need, but thanks.