Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

Nik Taylor wrote:

> > >  What's interesting, is that English is spoken as the
> > > standard language in a number of nations, whose people
> > > (usually :-) ) all insist that they speak the same language across
> > > national boundaries.
>
> One wonders, if the South had won the Civil War, and the two sides
> remained in bitter animosity, would they claim to speak different
> languages?  Or, if America and Britain had remained bitter enemies after
> the Rev. War, would we claim to speak American, rather than English?
Unlikely in the first case, possible in the second.  Most Southern Americans
at the time spoke a nonrhotic dialect, which differed little from many North-
Eastern dialects.  (Standard American has, in fact, not wiped out many of
these nonrhotic varieties, as any traveling through parts of New York City
or Boston would show, but they are often confined to working class
neighborhoods).   The level of lexical differentiation was small, too;  apart
from regionalisms like _yaller bread_ (corn bread) or the [grisi]/[grizi]
distinction, there wasn't a lot to speak of.  If anything, the Southern elite
might have maintained nonrhotic speech in educated circles, while the North
didn't, but that's hard to say.

As for the transatlantic divide, that may well have been the case.  As late
as 1850, 36 years after the British had sacked Washington, D.C.,
Edgar Allen Poe wrote a science-fiction short story entitled _Mellonta Tauta_
(<http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/works/mellonta.html>) set in the year 2848,
where the writer refers to all other nation states differently from current usage
(Jurmains, Vrinch, Inglitch), which might imply that there has been a change
vis-a-vis British dialects (although it's not very clear on that point).

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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