On 05/04/18 18:53, Mick wrote: > On Thursday, 5 April 2018 18:12:06 BST Peter Humphrey wrote: >> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote: > >>> But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's >>> English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is >>> considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the >>> Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century. >> >> Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because >> it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's >> English with Received Pronunciation? > > Quite. As far as accents goes my understanding is they are essentially one > and the same and were shaped by the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German > accents of the English Royals and their courtiers. The way I see it, the > Saxons won the pronunciation war over the Vikings. :-) > Not necessarily :-)
Because dialect is a lot more than pronunciation. It's also spelling, and vocabulary. To some extent I was thinking of what I believe is called "the great fricative shift", and the frenchification of our spelling in the 17/18 hundreds. (My daughter has moved to Yorkshire, so we have the occasional head-scratch when she comes out with dialect words, although her accent reverts almost instantly to South-London when we're around. Her husband's family hail from further north so they can be hard to understand. And my interest in Scottish and pre-Norman history has given me an understanding of where English has come from, which has nothing to do with where most people think it came from - the Saxons speak English, the Angles speak Scots, and the Scots speak Gaelic ... :-) Cheers, Wol
