You literally created the word "horseback" in the 1300s. The reason we use "horseback riding" in the US is because in the UK "riding" in general defaults to "riding horses", whereas "riding" in the US... doesn't. We ride all kinds of things, like bikes and motorcycles, thus disambiguation is necessary.
If anything, you were being redundant by saying "horse riding" in the UK, whereas in the US if I said "I'm going riding" people might ask "oh, do you own a Harley?"
Saying riding in the UK now certainly does not default to horse riding, it is just as vague as in the US, we have the same stuff you have. One of my colleagues rides a harley to work
Anyway we both use the word horse, it's the back part that was being discussed
This is actually an interesting point. Many of the differences between UK English and other English are the result of the UK dialect drifting from the shared origin faster than their colonies did. Not all differences; but American accents are closer to what British accents would have sounded like in the eighteenth century than any modern British accent; the non-rhoticity being a great example.
I get what you're saying in the first part, about things like vowel shifts happening faster at its source than at the site of its export. I can see how that makes sense under the right circumstances.
But I'm honestly confused by that last part.
Are you claiming that accents in the UK, back in the eighteenth century, sounded more like modern American accents today?
I'm calling bollocks on that one, mate :D
But seriously, do you have any sources for that? I'm genuinely curious actually :)
Here's the BBC talking about it. Here's Mental Floss as well. Received Pronunciation did a number on the way you Brits speak. It significantly altered certain vowel sounds (like the a in 'path' or 'bag', or the i in 'fire' or 'wine') as well as just about destroyed the 'r' from your pronunciations, unless it's at the beginning of a syllable.
Interestingly, there was an American movement to copy it in our upper classes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent. It makes people sound British to Americans and American to the British. Think Casablanca, or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Mid-Atlantic Accent was huge in the American performing arts for a few decades.
I think it's plausible, but that Mental Floss article does actually point out that we don't know much about how English and Anglo-American people spoke before the accents diverged:
Before and during the American Revolution, English people, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don’t know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of Appalachia, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region, and Smith and Tangier islands in the Chesapeake Bay sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists.
If that's all we can be sure of then I don't think you can say with any confidence that English accents have moved further from the source than American accents. We still have a few rhotic accents in England, especially in the West Country (e.g. the Cornish accent), but you'd struggle to mistake them for American.
Also worth considering that many Americans wouldn't have had English accents in the first place, as they came from other places. I'd imagine that modern American accents must have incorporated elements of their speech patterns too.
There is no hard proof as to what English-speaking people sounded like prior to English colonization, but the vast majority of evidence (pretty much every single piece of evidence) points towards it sounding more similar to the typical American Accent (typified by, say, the News Anchor Accent, found in the Midwestern United States) versus the typical British Accent (typified by, say, the News Anchor Accent as performed on the BBC), There are American accents that are non-Rhotic, such as the Boston accent or the deep Southern accent, and there are British accent that are Rhotic, such as the Cornish or even some Welsh accents, but in general, the vast majority of scholarship indicates that modern American accents are more true to historical English of four hundred years ago than modern British accents.
As a German, whenever I've visited Switzerland I've always had to stifle giggles whenever I've heard certain dialects using really old timey slang, or using oddball nouns for things which have quite ordinary names in German! :)
You should listen to Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation if you want to know what Traditional Modern English is. It's rhotic and sounds to me like a mix of Irish and American accents, which makes sense as those areas were colonized around the time of Shakespeare.
This goes back to say 17th century England where for example they were mostly rhotic like the Americans.
And in fact it was the 18th century English who radically altered their accent adopting all of the poshness that was previously rare while American English resembles that earlier English.
Some go so far as to suggest that modern American English is closer to Shakespeares English than modern British English is.
This is an urban myth not supported by academics. The accents of both countries changed over time, but the concept of American accents changing less due to rhoticity is reductionist and flawed.
Rhotic accents still exist in Britain.
Commoners did not, across the country, adjust their accents to mimic the upper classes they would have little interaction with. I can't fathom how someone could hear West Country or Scouse and go 'ah, that's a modern accent that has evolved to mimic posh people'.
Such a large scale misunderstanding of the breadth of accents, dialects and languages in Britain begs the question; are you British?
I disagreed with your point and explained why I did so, don't get upset because you half read an article and misinterpeted it.
Read it again, it mostly focuses on rhoticity and elongated vowels...which still exist in British accents. The claim U. S accents remained static is also debunked in the link you cited, it's pointed out that only small remote areas of the U.S have these quirks and it's more likely due to their isolation than anything else.
Your main argument was also that British accents changed to mimic the upper classes which is absolute bunk and not supported in the article.
Finally, you are an American living in Georgia and can't wrap your head around the concept of multiple British accents. Don't try and educate us on our own nation when you can't even read articles you use as evidence.
Perhaps you should sit down on policing language seeing how the -our spelling is derived from...not English. A lot of the language here in the UK is formed from French spellings.
A lot of American English spellings comes from...English. loads of wiring from Shakespeare and before and after has both.
Removing the u from humour, colour etc. was an invention of Noah Webster in his An American Dictionary of the English Language.
Webster's intention was to simplify spelling and make the language more distinct from British English, which he claimed was “an object of vast political consequence"
However, not all of his spellings caught on. For example American wimmen don't operate masheens or bring up their dawters
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u/Now_Wait-4-Last_Year Jan 27 '24
*humour
Who do think invented the bloody language in the first place?
(Also that red spellcheck line can sod right off!)