America Speaks The Best English

If you have an interest in the history of England it is hard to believe one never noticed the welsh and how they are just as distinguishable as a people where it comes to culture, language and identity as the irish and scottish. I mean just take a look at their townnames:

 

Said to be the longest railway station sign in the world. Even the Welsh abbreviate it to Llanfair gogogoch. The double 'l' sound is guttral, and doesn't occur in English.

 

The welsh are clearly more pragmatic than their language makes them seem

 

who cares about the double "I" what's up with the quadruple L's??

 

and is why, as I mentioned earlier, Modern American English is by far the most descriptive and versatile language and why it has been universally adopted for many areas of academia around the world.

 

I think the quadruple llll is actually the double l at the end of one syllable and the start of another. But I don't speak the language - only a few words.

The name means: "St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the fierce whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave"

 

Here's a soundfile of the pronunciation.

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/soundfiles/llandad4.wav

 

How can you say american english is the most descriptive if you don't understand languages like chinese, indian, or (dare I say it ) dutch? That it is adopted as the most common language in several professional fields can also be for different reasons.

 

They are just about invisible to Americans. Not my choice.

Every American kid in public school has to read Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens. We know what the Globe Theater looked like. We all know about the legend of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and his magic sword Excalibur. We know that before him, the islands were settled by the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, etc. We've seen pictures of Stonehenge. We can recognize paintings of Henry VIII, and the uniforms of the Beefeater guards at the Tower of London. We can identify Big Ben on sight. We know that Winston Churchill was the good guy of WWII, and George III was the bad guy of the American Revolution. The royal family is covered by the American media, often in nauseating detail.

Our images of Scotland and Ireland are more fluff, less substance. Show any American a cartoon drawing of a leprechaun in green, drinking a Guinness, and we will immediately say "Ireland". Sean Connery in a kilt, playing bagpipes, riding on the back of the Loch Ness monster? That's as Scottish as you can get. We did get serious news coverage of the Catholic/protestant violence in Northern Ireland, back when it was a big deal. In fiction, we've all seen too many movies and TV shows to count that were set in Scotland and Ireland. We can all instantly identify the accents. Many American communities still have annual Scotch/Irish folk festivals, where folks celebrate the cultural traditions of their ancestors. Sometimes these events also feature Celtic music and dance.

Wales? Put a gun to my head, and I still can't give you anything specific.

 

Does it not have the most words in active use? I've heard that as a complaint, as it makes English harder to learn.

 

look into it yourself. I'm not making this shit up as I go along.
Modern American English has the most wide ranging vocabulary because it is an amalgamation of many different languages.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/is-it-true-that-english-has-the-most-words-of-any-language

"However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages.
The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs.
English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources."

 

This accent is obviously exaggerated, but I've known lots of people who speak like this.

BTW, if you haven't seen this video, watch it. It's hilarious. lol

[media]http://youtu.be/GBZUaYhfgTc[/media]

 

Copying that quote and adding certainty to your claim is indeed a little bit different than making shit up. Although one of the first things I notice in there are the words 'seems quite probable' And to me it still doesn't stand without question that the hypothesis that it is the most descriptive IS the reason that it has become the most common language in the academic world

 

i finally remembered what else i remembered about the cimri, besides preservationist railways, and pasties. cousin jacks. mining expertese. people from wales being in demand to opporate the mines. well grass valley and nevada city california, late 1800s, had a large community of welsh imigrants who worked the big industrial gold mines they had there. silly sinior brain fart of me to not remember that.

 

actually it has the most slipperyist vocabulary, making it the best language for deception. that is what makes it useful for business. but not for things like science and engineering. for which the germanic languages are prefered. the romance languages for poetry, although persian too. and far asian languages for spiritual phylosophy.

as to the quote, consider what its quoting from. no bias there. much.

 

I grew up in Boston. We don't pronounce "r" unless it's the first letter (i.e. runner......um, runnah) or follows a consonant (i.e. track).

"I was headin' to the packie to pick up some beeah, but got pulled ovah by a cruisah fah not usin' my blinkahs"

"The Sox ah wicked pissa"

Our accent is actually a derivative of 17th century English.

I've lived all over the U.S., have been told our accent sounds like we come from the gutter. I can't argue the point, I guess in some ways it does. The accent varies across Boston, it's a little different in inner-city neighborhoods than outlying neighborhoods and the burbs. I'm an inner-city "kid" (not really a kid anymore) so mine is pretty heavy from what I've been told. I don't notice it.

For what it's worth, I don't know what the heck you call the Kennedy's accent. If I didn't know any better I'd think they were from Maine.

It lightens up after I've been gone awhile. Four years in the Army and it became less pronounced, but when I drank nobody could understand me. It came back quickly when I got out. Now I'm in California and having the same language barrier. I keep being told, "Speak English". Whatevah.

As a Bostonian living in exile I'll leave you with these words of wisdom..........the Yankees suck!