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美国何时失去了英国口音
Ok, so I got a lot of grief in the comments of my video about sneakerhead moms for the way I pronounced Adidas. The Seeker Daily team spent a lot of time talking about this because Adidas is the way we all normally say it. All of us except one, my amazing coworker Aneeta Akhurst, who happens to be British,says “Adidas” instead of Adidas, and I
have to admit it does sound pretty cool - and we generally spend a lot of time marvelling at the way she says things. It got me wondering- when did the British give way to the seriously-less-cool American accent? Well, the first thing to say about this is that there are many different accents for both Brits and Americans, and as we’ll see a number of them have similar qualities.
由于我Adidas的发音问题，我的视频受到许多人的抨击。Seeker Daily团队曾经多次探讨这个问题，因为正常情况下Adidas是这样发音的。所有人，除了我的同事Aneeta Akhurst之外，她刚好是英国人，她的发音是这样的，我不得不承认听上去非常酷——我们经常花费大量时间惊叹她的发音方式。这让我思考——英国口音什么时候给不那么酷的美国口音让步的？首先要说的就是，英国人和美国人都有许多各种各样的口音，我们会看到两者在这一点上是类似的。
We don’t have any recordings the early 17th century, when Brits started to come en masse to American shores, but we’re safe in assuming that “Americans” and British of that time shared the same way of speaking. By the time of our earliest audio wax recordings, almost 300 years later, the United States accent was decidedly different from that of our English cousins. It seems the separation of accents is as much a result of what happened in the UK as in the US. One of the most notable differences between the two accents is the way we pronounce the letter “R”. In America, most of us pronounce the ‘r’ in words like hard, card, ever, water, and dare, but Brits say “hard, card,ever, water, and dare”. This is the difference between what called “rhotic” and “non-rhotic” speech. The interesting thing is that the first British that came to America did pronounce their ‘r’s and it wasn’t until later in Britain, around 1800, that the non-rhotic speech became popular among the upper classes in the south of England and eventually became the pronunciation that was taught in schools.
我们没有17世纪初期的任何录音，当时英国人开始大举迁往美国海岸，但是保险起见，我们假设那时的美国人和英国人口音是一样的。到了我们最早的录音录像资料，大约300年后，美国口音已经与英国口音出现明显不同。似乎口音的分化很大程度上是英国和美国历史事件的影响。两种口音之间一个最显著的差别就是字母“R”的发音。在美国，比如hard, card, ever, water和dare等单词中r的发音就和英国不同。这就是辅音前的r发音和不发音的差别。有趣的是，迁往美国的第一个英国人说话时“r”确实发音，直到后来，大约1800年，英格兰南部上层社会辅音前的r不发音的方式越来越流行，最终学校也开始这样教。
Of course, there are some accents in the UK-- like those of Ireland and Scotland -- which are rhotic, and there are those in America- like in Boston and places in the south -- that are non-rhotic and don’t pronounce the ‘r’.
当然，英国一些地方的口音——比如爱尔兰和苏格兰——这些地区辅音前的r发音，美国也有一些地方——比如波士顿和南方某些地区，辅音前的r不发音。
So the interesting thing here is that Brits may have more to do with the difference in accents than Americans do. In other words,it’s not our fault.
所以，有趣的是，英国人或许与口音的不同有更多的关系。换句话说，并不是美国人的错。
