And on the language thing, note that while New England English is closer to traditional English, many other American dialects are... well, significantly further away than British English is. America is a big place with a lot of variation!
I believe he was referring to the American/British English spelling split (which originated with the publication of the first major dictionaries; modern British English is more or less in line with Johnson's spellings, American English with Webster's).
Though on the subject of dialects, if my memory serves, Appalachian dialects are actually quite similar to Elizabethan-era English. Also, the classic "Southern drawl" is derived from the speech habits of the British nobility a few centuries ago; the proto-middle-class wealthy families that owned those plantations tended to imitate the nobility, as was often the case for the moneyed but untitled in those days, and that happened to stick.
Of course it's also somewhat of a moot point, because there isn't really such a thing as "true" English in the historical sense; once you go back farther than the early-modern stuff (place it at c. 1500 CE, more or less), it's pretty much unrecognizable. Old English is functionally a foreign language, and in some respects is farther from modern English than the modern Romance languages are from each other. Middle English was a radical transformation of the language (paralleling socio-political events of the time), and the transition into what we can consider "modern" English during the English Renaissance is arguably just as significant a change. In functional terms, the English of the days of Henry VIII is scarcely more alien to modern English speakers than the various dialects of the former British Empire. The primary difference is that we confuse poor schoolchildren by forcing them to study it without any explanation of the language or of the historical context or references of what they're reading.
But yes, according to the linguists and scholars who study Elizabethan-era England who I have spoken with, if you want to know what Londoners sounded like, Appalachia isn't a poor starting point. o.0
Now what was this thread about?
Oh, yes. Donuts need holes, and they don't count if they have a nasty filling; those are called "rubbish". Ones with good filling are pretty much just pastries in the generic sense, no need to make them out to be something they aren't.
Author
Topic: Do donuts need to have holes to be classified as donuts (Read 20976 times)