Is "received" English really English with a pronounced French accent?
Victor B. Schneider, Ph. D.
to the "French" that is spoken in London. The idea was that, to find
people really speaking English, you needed to go away from London. I
was listening to a speaker of "received" English on television today,
and it hit me: "Received" English is English with the remnants of a
French accent. So, there must be some French scholar out there with a
lot of spare time on his hands (or anything else), maybe someone lolling
around in oisivite at the Academie Francaise, who might want to find out
whether proper English is really a leftover of French in the U. K. that
never really went away.
And, while we're at it, I am perplexed. There seems to be an
underground war going on between France and the English-speaking
countries. How else to explain the sending of refugees down the chunnel
to England, and the recent Reed affair? If so, that war must also be
against French television, in which the announcers have been working
diligently to bastardize modern French by replacing French words with
Anglicisms.
Don Phillipson
news:bp7Z7.869$nu1.1...@dfiatx1-snr1.gtei.net...
> Here and there in old English literature, you find derogatory references
> to the "French" that is spoken in London. The idea was that, to find
> people really speaking English, you needed to go away from London.
Some considerations:
1. This is an observation about accent (pronunciation) --
not about syntax or lexicon.
2. Before the age of broadcasting (say 1920-40) it appears
no European country had a single standard or preferred
accent. Accents were multiple, according to geography
and social class as well. Radio exercised a huge homogenizing
influence, but not uniformly in all countries. British radio
promoted what people in 1930 believed to be the London
middle-class accent: but French and German radio did
not promote the Paris or Berlin accents (which many
intellectuals of those two countries actively disliked.)
3. We might know more if VBS gave examples of where
in English French accents are mentioned, e.g. the Wife of
Bath in the Canterbury Tales (1400.)
> was listening to a speaker of "received" English on television today,
> and it hit me: "Received" English is English with the remnants of a
> French accent. So, there must be some French scholar out there with a
> lot of spare time on his hands (or anything else), maybe someone lolling
> around in oisivite at the Academie Francaise, who might want to find out
> whether proper English is really a leftover of French in the U. K. that
> never really went away.
Sources like Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Eng.
Language deal with the factual background, e.g. the
survival in modern English of French vs. German (Saxon)
words or grammatical forms. But VBS's thesis is not
convincing by itself, for lack of positive evidence of phonemic
influence in modern English (different from lexical heritage)
in the last 500 years.
--
Donald Phillipson
dphil...@trytel.com
Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada)
613 822 0734
Raymond S. Wise
Received Pronunciation (RP) was a prestige accent long before the time
of radio:
From *The Oxford Companion to the English Language* at
http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=443604&secid=.-&hh=1
[quote]
The heyday of Empire, approximately 1890 - 1940, was also the high
point of RP, which has been described by such terms as 'patrician' and
'proconsular'. Its possession was a criterion for the selection of
young men as potential officers during the First World War and it has
been the accent favoured for recruits to the Foreign Office and other
services representing the British nation (largely drawn from the
public schools, with a slight enlargement of the catchment area in
recent years).
[end quote]
As for scholarly studies of RP, it's true that a French scholar might
study RP with different biases from a British scholar, however,
consider the following:
[quote]
Since its initial description by Jones in the _English Pronouncing
Dictionary (EPD)_ in 1917, it has probably become the most described
and discussed accent on earth.
[end quote]
On a subject as studied as that, it seems to me that if an English
scholar had suspected French influence on Received Pronunciation, he
would find it an irresistible to try to verify that hypothesis.
--
Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com