No, that was really me and not Adam. Gah! Go wash your mouth out with soap!
But I have been reading a lot of articles, which I will attempt to paraphrase rather than excerpt directly -- point taken!:
This article, http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002847.php , cites some reasons why American English was already noticeably diverging from British speech well before the revolutionary period. In Britain, dialectical variation was closely tied to social standing. In other words, the aristocracy spoke differently from the common people. Well, aristocrats simply did not up stakes and head out for the hard life in the New World with too much frequency. So their linguistic styles were pretty much absent from the colonies, along with any pressure to emulate them. As Americans were descended mainly from middle and lower-class British immigrants, that was how they spoke, and pronunciations that were considered very inferior in the UK and frowned upon became commonplace in the colonies, with no sense of shame attached.
The examples that the article gives strike me as very old-fashioned and somewhat Southern -- not surprising, since American Southern dialects are very conservative. Seems to be more of a vowel shift, like a pen-pin merger going on here:
"Because English speech marked social station, the general absence of upper-class Britons from transatlantic migration inhibited direct transplantation of elite social dialects. As a result, individuals in every colonial region and, more to the point, all social ranks employed speech forms that Britons of higher status thought vulgar. For example, many colonials pronounced cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary. In Britain, these pronunciations marked lower social status; in America, they became stylistic variants among individuals of every rank and region, not simply indicators of class. The inability of colonial speech to replicate the full range of idioms that registered the British social hierarchy was another form of leveling..."
The article also notes that because British emigrants to America came from all over the UK, the various dialects of the mother country began to merge into a homogenous blend. Well mostly, anyway. One British visitor pointed out a certain glaring exception that still exists to this day: "No County or Colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.”
But were they rhotic? Robert MacNeil, in Do You Speak American, says that many early colonists weren't, but a key group was -- the Scots-Irish. Since they were latecomers to the colonies and relatively poor, they settled mainly in Philadelphia and farther inland on the crappy land that hadn't already been taken, and their accent was the one that made it inland, away from the less rhotic coasts. (They also get blamed for introducing a twangy quality.)
However, I came across some articles on colonial Australian and New Zealand speech that looked at old recordings of very old first generation Aussies and Kiwis, probably born in the mid-19th century to British emigrant parents and thus closer to the British spectrum of pronunciation, and found, to the authors' surprise, that many of these elderly people were far more rhotic than expected -- rhoticity had apparently survived longer in many parts of the UK than suspected, and the nonrhoticity of modern New Zealanders can't entirely be contributed to the speech patterns of their earliest ancestors!
But back to early Americans -- this article, http://www.bartleby.com/185/12.html , notes that there were a lot of pronunciations in colonial America that would be unheard of today -- full pronunciation of the L in would and the W in sword, deaf rhyming with leaf (this does survive in elderly hillbilly accents), and the preservation of -ar for -er, which we now think of as being a mainly British idiosyncracy (although we still have the variant "varmint" for "vermin", which follows the same pattern as the British fondness for saying derby as "darby" and "clark" for clerk).
Some things that immediately mark North American speech were noted by British visitors shortly after the War of 1812:
"The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he shew (showed) me his pictures.” Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented; missionary becomes missionairy, angel, ângel, danger, dânger, etc."
But I have been reading a lot of articles, which I will attempt to paraphrase rather than excerpt directly -- point taken!:
This article, http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002847.php , cites some reasons why American English was already noticeably diverging from British speech well before the revolutionary period. In Britain, dialectical variation was closely tied to social standing. In other words, the aristocracy spoke differently from the common people. Well, aristocrats simply did not up stakes and head out for the hard life in the New World with too much frequency. So their linguistic styles were pretty much absent from the colonies, along with any pressure to emulate them. As Americans were descended mainly from middle and lower-class British immigrants, that was how they spoke, and pronunciations that were considered very inferior in the UK and frowned upon became commonplace in the colonies, with no sense of shame attached.
The examples that the article gives strike me as very old-fashioned and somewhat Southern -- not surprising, since American Southern dialects are very conservative. Seems to be more of a vowel shift, like a pen-pin merger going on here:
"Because English speech marked social station, the general absence of upper-class Britons from transatlantic migration inhibited direct transplantation of elite social dialects. As a result, individuals in every colonial region and, more to the point, all social ranks employed speech forms that Britons of higher status thought vulgar. For example, many colonials pronounced cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary. In Britain, these pronunciations marked lower social status; in America, they became stylistic variants among individuals of every rank and region, not simply indicators of class. The inability of colonial speech to replicate the full range of idioms that registered the British social hierarchy was another form of leveling..."
The article also notes that because British emigrants to America came from all over the UK, the various dialects of the mother country began to merge into a homogenous blend. Well mostly, anyway. One British visitor pointed out a certain glaring exception that still exists to this day: "No County or Colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.”
But were they rhotic? Robert MacNeil, in Do You Speak American, says that many early colonists weren't, but a key group was -- the Scots-Irish. Since they were latecomers to the colonies and relatively poor, they settled mainly in Philadelphia and farther inland on the crappy land that hadn't already been taken, and their accent was the one that made it inland, away from the less rhotic coasts. (They also get blamed for introducing a twangy quality.)
However, I came across some articles on colonial Australian and New Zealand speech that looked at old recordings of very old first generation Aussies and Kiwis, probably born in the mid-19th century to British emigrant parents and thus closer to the British spectrum of pronunciation, and found, to the authors' surprise, that many of these elderly people were far more rhotic than expected -- rhoticity had apparently survived longer in many parts of the UK than suspected, and the nonrhoticity of modern New Zealanders can't entirely be contributed to the speech patterns of their earliest ancestors!
But back to early Americans -- this article, http://www.bartleby.com/185/12.html , notes that there were a lot of pronunciations in colonial America that would be unheard of today -- full pronunciation of the L in would and the W in sword, deaf rhyming with leaf (this does survive in elderly hillbilly accents), and the preservation of -ar for -er, which we now think of as being a mainly British idiosyncracy (although we still have the variant "varmint" for "vermin", which follows the same pattern as the British fondness for saying derby as "darby" and "clark" for clerk).
Some things that immediately mark North American speech were noted by British visitors shortly after the War of 1812:
"The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason, is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he shew (showed) me his pictures.” Such words as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented; missionary becomes missionairy, angel, ângel, danger, dânger, etc."