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Why/how did British vs. American stress differences arise? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(I should note I'm ESL and I've noticed my pronunciation is a hodgepodge of British vs. American and older vs. younger pronunciation variants.)

As I was watching Geoff Lindsey's YT videos, I noticed the way he pronounces "transláte", particularly in "Google Transláte" where I heavily prefer the accent "tránslate" - although in the verb (i.e. outside the website name) I would be fine both with tránslate or transláte (but probably with mild preference for the former).

So I looked it up and it turns out this is a widespread case of variant British vs. American stress pattern, also affecting other "-ate" verbs: donate, locate, migrate... The polarisation doesn't appear to be absolute, e.g. to take representatives of US and UK pronunciation: Webster 1913 (=1890) has dónate, lócate, mígrate, but still transláte, Jones (Pronouncing Dict.) 1944 has final stress in all four, but the Concise Oxford Dict. of Current Eng. (1964) mentions the variant mígrate. Today the influence of US on UK is probably even stronger. But already in 1909 Jespersen mentions the variant pronunciation of dictate, narrate, and vacate (Mod. Eng. Gramm. vol. 1, §5.57), so surely it hasn't appeared in UK only due to US influence?

Is there some dialectological or formal explanation of this change, or a study of where and how it spread?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ah ok.

Kind of related, the vowel/stress change was happening when printing was solidifying Grammer and spelling rules.

Which is why things are spelled one way and pronounced another.

It was a language in flux where decisions were made by non native speakers who would just go on gut instinct.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

It's still happening. People often treat sound and grammar changes as if they were instant ramen, 3min and it's done, but they often take centuries.

Another example of the same process is the regularisation of strong verbs:

dare/durst → dare/dared (complete)
yield/yold → yield/yielded (complete)
burn/burnt → burn/burned (ongoing)
glide/glid[den] → glide/glided (ongoing)

And some are left unfinished, like the plurals - it started in Old English time but you still see pairs like child/children, sheep/sheep, goose/geese.

All of that is internal to the language. It doesn't really need external influences, like the printing press. All you need is children "filling the gaps": learning an word but not the associated irregular forms, filling them with rules they already learned, and eventually keeping that new form later on.

It was a language in flux where decisions were made by non native speakers who would just go on gut instinct.

All languages are in a perpetual flux. That said I don't think non-native speakers are a meaningful force in this.