Posted by Dave Thewlis on August 31, 2011 at 17:22:13 user dthewlis.
In Reply to: Re: Pronunciation posted by Owen Roberts on August 31, 2011 at 14:20:41:
Well, common American is not a reflection of spoken English about the time of QE1 (if there is such a thing as "common American" (or for the fastidious, "uncommon American")). On the other hand some of the preserved dialects, such as Ed mentions, very much do seem to be more or less English "as she was spoke" at the time the colonies were being established and until the late 1700s.
These are mostly remote dialects which were little touched by others until rather recently, and especially show up in "real" country music (mostly today preserved in what's called "bluegrass"). Folk songs are little changed from the versions sung in England at the time of the American settlements, and much of the speech seems to be also -- to the extent that stage professionals (and the folks who established the Renaissance Faires in the U.S.) and many academic professionals have studied the dialects as probably the most accurate preservation of Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan English (of particular interest to Shakespearean folk).
An interesting tangent to this is that since American English was established before the Napoleonic Wars, we (Americans) preserved many common French terms subsequently abandoned by the English during the wars in favor of more English terms. ("Exit" --> "Way Out", "Bordeaux" --> "Claret", "Hors d'oeuvre"--> "Starter" (we gave up and got "Appetizer" later as nobody this side of the Atlantic and south of the Quebec border could spell the original term anyhow)).
There are a lot of other examples, and they generally serve to demonstrate a forking of the British and American versions of English which began to occur quite naturally after 1781, but were given a strong boost around 1800 or so.