Re: Obama

Taylor Kingston wrote:
..

(in Latin "Anglii," from which the word
"English" derives)


http://www.hotrodders.com/vehicles/125.html


"It is as though the English could not be bothered to learn
the language of the island they had conquered," say McCrum, Cran and
MacNeil in "The Story of English" (Viking, 1986), my source for most
of the above.

Program 7: The Muvver Tongue
This program covers the story of Cockneys, Australians, and Aborigines.
The Cockney accent and slang comes from the east end of London and is
considered working-class speech. The word, Cockney, comes from middle
English and means cock's egg or runt. The characteristic sound of
Cockney is to drop the leading "H" sound in words and to replace the
"Th" sound with a "V" sound: Hello becomes 'ello and mother becomes
muvver. Cockneys like to speak in rhyming slang, replacing words with a
recognized, usually humorous, rhyming word or phrase: the word, wife, is
replaced with "trouble and strife," the word, hat, is replaced with
titfer, from tit for tat, the word, talk, is replaced with rabbit and
pork, leading to the expression: rabbiting on, to describe someone who
is speaking at length and emphatically about something. Cockneys also
use back slang, which is to say words backwards: Boy becomes yob.
Cockneys love to use large, dramatic words like diabolical because they
enjoy the humorous overemphasis. Cockneys also borrow words from many
languages such as Yiddish and Romany, as in using knosh for food and
dukes for hands. If Cockneys start sounding their H's and Th's, they are
usually made fun of by their peers for putting on airs in order to move
up in social standing. In the late middle-ages, everyone from the London
area spoke Cockney, but the upper-classes wanted to distinguish
themselves from the working classes and did so by switching to public
school English. In the eighteenth century, the writer, Jonathan Swift
proposed an academy to regulate the English language in order to reduce
its constantly changing character. During this time, Samuel Johnson made
the first English dictionary, which became the first stabilizing
authority by linking spoken English words to a printed standard.
Therefore the educated middle-class leaned to speak like the dictionary
and scorned the Cockneys. The Cockney influence went to Australia
because Cockneys made up one-third of Australia's first colonists. Many
Aborigine words were borrowed, such as boomerang, kangaroo, and
billabong. The prisoners of the Australian penal colony came from all
the counties of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The word, wowser, means
someone who is a kill-joy and comes from the rural North of Britain,
cobber means friend and comes from Suffolk, larakin means a young person
and comes from Warwickshire, corker means a very good thing and comes
from Ireland. The prisoners spoke the Flash language of the criminal
classes. The prisoner, Flash Tim Voe, wrote a vocabulary of Flash
language in 1812 that British magistrates used to understand what was
being said in court. Australian English continued to feature many words
from Flash language because many released prisoners chose to settle in
Australia. Free colonists picked up Flash language from ex-convicts.
Australian is considered the most classless form of English because it
derives from so many sources and classes. A few Australians speak
cultivated Australian which sounds more like the standard, middle-class
speech of England. The accents of the English of Australia, South
Africa, and New Zealand sound very similar because they were all settled
in roughly the same time period. The Australians used to feel that their
language was inferior to that of England, but now celebrate their own
dialect.

http://homepage.mac.com/ebranscomb/courses/HEL/story.html

....
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Spelling Problems in Outlook 2003 SP1
    ... **Australian English and spell checks to that. ... >>> dictonary changes back to English, ... >>> i have set the language to Englishas the default. ...
    (microsoft.public.outlook.installation)
  • Re: Word 2002 switches between UK & US dictionaries
    ... Microsoft MVP. ... text pastes as US English. ... into the middle of a sentence, I'll then have some words in Australian ... So without a specific language, text pastes into Word and its ...
    (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement)
  • Re: How do I remove English (US) as a default language?
    ... setting set to Australian, Office language setting set to Australian, Auto ... a 4000 word assignment in English I have tried to remove English ...
    (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement)
  • Re: Herd instincts?
    ... Since I'm an Australian currently living in the Netherlands this might ... This may be true in your dialect of English. ... English your first language? ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Leodhasach & Hearasch - Gaelic help please
    ... course our own traditional language is even more neglected than Gaelic is. ... who speak English soon get the gist of it. ... is someone who truly appreciates Scottish culture in that you won't find ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)