Will vs. Shall

Travis   Thu Mar 08, 2007 3:08 pm GMT
>>I agree with Norma that "shall" can still be used in first-person questions like that without sounding archaic. <<

Such does sound archaic here outside of fixed usages and deliberately formal/poetic speech; in everyday speech and even most formal speech such cases of "shall" have been replaced by "should" here.
Skippy   Thu Mar 08, 2007 4:58 pm GMT
OBEV-

Actually, colonies typically preserve languages better than the home countries. Americans sound more like Shakespearean English speakers than Australians, who in turn sound more like it than British people (although one should keep in mind that in 2007 none of them are going to sound much like it).
Travis   Thu Mar 08, 2007 5:15 pm GMT
>>OBEV-

Actually, colonies typically preserve languages better than the home countries. Americans sound more like Shakespearean English speakers than Australians, who in turn sound more like it than British people (although one should keep in mind that in 2007 none of them are going to sound much like it). <<

Not necessarily. Yes, there are some places where North American English is more conservative than most English English dialects, such as being rhotic and retaining the subjunctive mood, there are other places where it is clearly very progressive in comparison to English English, in particular vowel system, where English English is the closest to late Early New English out of English as a whole today (note that this does not mean the individual vowel phonemes identities and qualities but also the relationship between vowel length and tenseness, which is best preserved in English English).
Josh Lalonde   Thu Mar 08, 2007 5:38 pm GMT
<<where English English is the closest to late Early New English out of English as a whole today (note that this does not mean the individual vowel phonemes identities and qualities but also the relationship between vowel length and tenseness, which is best preserved in English English).>>

Isn't Standard Scottish English (SSE) closer to Early Modern English in its vowel system? The only innovations I can think of for SSE are the cot-caught merger (sometimes), the look-Luke merger, and the Scots Vowel Length rule. (Southern) English English, on the other hand, has the fir-fur-fern merger, centring diphthongs, the trap-bath split, the horse-hoarse merger, the bad-lad split (sometimes). Also, I'm not sure what the terminology is, but there is also the split that originally developed the /A:/ phoneme, from 'father' and the lengthening before /l/ and /r/ (the Sam-psalm split, perhaps?). I think SSE is also more conservative with its realizations of individual phonemes; /a/ was never raised to [{], /i:/, /e:/, /u:/ and /o:/ remained monophthongs, while they are often diphthongs in the South (though /u/ is considerably fronted in SSE). SSE is also much more conservative in terms of consonants, with /r/ often as [4] or [r], and the preservation of the witch-which distinction.
Travis   Thu Mar 08, 2007 6:31 pm GMT
>>Isn't Standard Scottish English (SSE) closer to Early Modern English in its vowel system? The only innovations I can think of for SSE are the cot-caught merger (sometimes), the look-Luke merger, and the Scots Vowel Length rule. (Southern) English English, on the other hand, has the fir-fur-fern merger, centring diphthongs, the trap-bath split, the horse-hoarse merger, the bad-lad split (sometimes). Also, I'm not sure what the terminology is, but there is also the split that originally developed the /A:/ phoneme, from 'father' and the lengthening before /l/ and /r/ (the Sam-psalm split, perhaps?). I think SSE is also more conservative with its realizations of individual phonemes; /a/ was never raised to [{], /i:/, /e:/, /u:/ and /o:/ remained monophthongs, while they are often diphthongs in the South (though /u/ is considerably fronted in SSE). SSE is also much more conservative in terms of consonants, with /r/ often as [4] or [r], and the preservation of the witch-which distinction.<<

I would have to say that while Scottish Standard English is very conservative in many ways, I normally do not take it into account with comparisons to it as I cannot say that many of the features that you mention above truly have direct continuity with Early New English but rather derive from Scots, such as the preservation of the fir-fur-fern distinction, with modern Scottish English having been formed essentially by the contact of Scots with (English) English dialects; prior to the Union there was no Scottish English, and the language of lowland Scotland was Scots, even in literary usage.

Some of the features you mention, though, are found in English dialects outside of Scotland (and that is excluding cases where the more innovative forms you mention were changed back to such forms, such as is the case with favoring monophthongal tense vowels in many NAE dialects or the use of [a] rather than [{] in Calfornia Vowel Shift-ed dialects). For instance, the raising of /a/ to [{] never happened in many northern English English dialects, there are scattered dialects which lack the horse-hoarse merger, and there are definitely dialects in North America which preserve the witch-which distinction.
Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 09, 2007 9:57 pm GMT
I suppose that makes sense. And now that I think about it, the Scots Vowel length rule is really quite a major change in the vowel inventory. It basically removes all vestiges of phonemic length and replaces it with a purely tense-lax distinction like in American English.
The history of Scottish English is very interesting to me, though I don't know that much about it. It reminds me of the so-called post-creole continuum of Jamaican Creole/Patois among others. I'm very interested in the boundaries between languages, and how contact between two closely related varieties produces subtle changes in both. Things like British Creole/London Jamaican, or the creole-origin hypothesis of AAVE, as well as the two examples I mentioned above, are my main areas of interest in English linguistics.
Wow, this thread has changed topic a lot.