{"id":4225,"date":"2015-04-01T06:57:52","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T10:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4225"},"modified":"2015-04-15T07:04:56","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T11:04:56","slug":"27-maps-about-english-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4225","title":{"rendered":"27 Maps about English & America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ellis Island Language Tree (photo: Colin Howley, creative commons license)<\/p><\/div>\n

The English language is rich and diverse\u2014and so difficult to learn, especially the spelling\u2014for reasons made amply clear by the first map in this fascinating series<\/a>. The English language has grown root and branch from a wide diversity of linguistic traditions.<\/p>\n

Moreover, English is full of idioms derived from all these different cultures. (A friend who is a native German-speaker wanted a book to read to improve his language skills, and I suggested The Big Sky<\/a>, a 1947 novel about the American frontier by Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. B. Guthrie, Jr. It\u2019s told in the plain language of the era and characters, and I thought it also might shed light on the formation of the American outlook, pre-1970 or so. Big mistake. Although the vocabulary was easy, the book was so shot full of idioms, phrases an American reader would understand at once, it was impossible for an outsider to parse.)<\/p>\n

Back to the maps. Others of particular interest include #7, the accompanying text of which points out that the pronunciation of American English today is closer to 18th-century British English than what current British speakers use. The changes that occurred in British English in the 19th century led to the dropping of the \u201cr\u201d after vowels, which elegant Hollywood stars of the 1930s and 1940s would emulate (“Chahles, wheah did you pahk the cah?”) and other pseudo-elegances, leading inevitably to Singin\u2019 in the Rain\u2019s<\/em> \u201cI cahn\u2019t, cahn\u2019t, cahn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

#13 is a map of Europe showing where English-speakers can most likely have a conversation in their native language. More than 95% of Britons can carry on such a conversation, as can 39% percent of people in France. Whether they will<\/em> do so is a separate question, though the French I\u2019ve encountered have shown great patience with my fumbling attempts at their language.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t miss #22, which is a reprise of a video that made the rounds some months ago, a woman demonstrating 17 different British accents. First up is the \u201creceived pronunciation\u201d that straddles differences across regions, akin to what we think of in the United States as newscaster-speak, or, more technically, as shown in map #24, \u201cGeneral Northern.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGeneral Northern\u201d has replaced a \u201ctruly astonishing\u201d number and variety of language families present on the North American continent when European explorers arrived. Few of these American Indian languages survive today. This story also is graphically told on these two maps<\/a>, accompanying Orin Hargraves’s Visual Thesaurus story on \u201cThe Continent of Lost Languages.\u201d
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