Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Re: Firefox and addons no longer supported question

[Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 05/04/18 18:53, Mick wrote:
> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 18:12:06 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Thursday, 5 April 2018 12:47:43 BST Wol's lists wrote:
> 
>>> But again this comes down to another moan of mine - why is "The Queen's
>>> English" considered "correct", while let's say Yorkshire Dialect is
>>> considered "wrong", when said dialect is hundreds of years old but the
>>> Queen's English has probably only been around for about a century.
>>
>> Correctness is not a helpful concept in a living language, not least because
>> it changes from decade to decade. Besides, are you confusing Queen's
>> English with Received Pronunciation?
> 
> Quite.  As far as accents goes my understanding is they are essentially one 
> and the same and were shaped by the Hanoverian/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha German 
> accents of the English Royals and their courtiers.  The way I see it, the 
> Saxons won the pronunciation  war over the Vikings.  :-)
> 
Not necessarily :-)

Because dialect is a lot more than pronunciation. It's also spelling,
and vocabulary.

To some extent I was thinking of what I believe is called "the great
fricative shift", and the frenchification of our spelling in the 17/18
hundreds.

(My daughter has moved to Yorkshire, so we have the occasional
head-scratch when she comes out with dialect words, although her accent
reverts almost instantly to South-London when we're around. Her
husband's family hail from further north so they can be hard to
understand. And my interest in Scottish and pre-Norman history has given
me an understanding of where English has come from, which has nothing to
do with where most people think it came from - the Saxons speak English,
the Angles speak Scots, and the Scots speak Gaelic ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol