What if America Had Remained Part of the Crown?

[glyn]

Well , the English members should start this purity campaign in their homeland ;) . About a year ago a Englishman became a customer to my employer. Came in several times , spoke with impossible accent and luckily was a good-humoured man , because everybody kept asking him (unintenionally) ´Sorry , do You speak English?´

Do you know where in England he came from? Some regional accents can be hard to understand.:)

[BD1]

North perhaps ? (´Hullo!´) Not that cockney is more understandable...

[gunnut]

hearing an educated - i suppose i mean less-strident - southern accent is like having Liv Tyler make love to your ears, a New York/Jersey accent drives one to beat its owner to death with the nearest wall. the rather nasty 'like, OMG' califorinan accent (or perhaps dialect?) produces a similar result.

That California accent you speak of is what we call "valley girl" talk.

"Oh my gawd, that's like sooo neeeeat!!!"

i suppose its a kind of a reflection on the way we view the differing parts of american society, with a southern accent you can imagine the speaker smiling at you while they're speaking, with a dreadful New York nasal accent you can imagine them stabbing you for standing on the PAVEMENT!

That's what I call "Brooklynese." The actress Rosy Perez has a heavy dose of it. She will absolutely drive you insane.

while the Californian accent - or perhaps 'shopping mall' accent - gives the distinct impression of absolute inactivity between the ears and appears to intone that while said imbecile may be speaking at you, they aren't actually aware of your existance...

You can find this in the movie "clueless."

[gunnut]

I watch some British television shows and movies sometimes. Besides the usual Irish accent and Scottish accent that I can easily tell, there are some other speech patterns I find interesting.

Tony Blair doesn't speak anything like what the characters in the new "Dr. Who" speak. The "t" is almost silent, but not quite. They also enunciate certain syllables in an almost exaggerated way.

[dalem]

When me & my friends went to Europe for vacation a few years ago we were all prepared with Matt's wife who speaks French, and German and French phrase books and the like. When we gout out of the train station in London and found a cab, we were completely unprepared for the barrage of spittle, haggis parts, and incomprehensible gutteral consonents tha came from the smiling mouth of our cabbie.

:)

We were worried at first then remembered our training - a Scotsman is usually more afraid of not getting his next drink than he is of you. ;)

-dale

[JAD_333]

A lovely belle with a soft Virginia accent is one of the finer pleasures in life...:)

Aye, it's my daily fare. Soothing to the ear. My wife's email message voice turns me to butter.

But a good swath of Virginny is addicted to double negatives--I ain't got no...and he don't have none are a couple of examples I hear everyday on the job site.

How about...there for their and their for there. Fortunately I had a Franciscan monk with the mind of a watchmaker to teach me English. It helped a little.

[JAD_333]

No, about 10 years old I think.

-dale

Found it on Amazon. Ordered. It better be good. thanks

[Blackleaf]

We all still be drinking tea

It was drinking tea (not gunboats or wealth or ingenuity) that built the British Empire.

If Americans drank lots of tea nowadays they may also have built an empire but, alas, time is running out and soon China will have a larger economy than you.

You messed up big time throwing it all into Boston harbour.

[Blackleaf]

if you'd stayed within the Empire/commonwealth then you wouldn't owe us anything like the amount in back-Taxes that you do.

and you'd put the letter 'U' in words too..

happy birthday septics.

Taxes in Britain were around 12 times higher than the taxes in our colonies in North America.

[clackers]

Tony Blair doesn't speak anything like what the characters in the new "Dr. Who" speak. The "t" is almost silent, but not quite. They also enunciate certain syllables in an almost exaggerated way.

The upper class have that silent 'r' happening too, Gunnut ... they say "finguh" rather than "finger" ...

You might point out to snobs that the American accent is a bit of a regional English time capsule, and is probably much closer to Shakespeare's speech than Tony Blair's "received pronunciation", which is a more recent phenomenon. He would go for a "darnse" instead of a "dance", for instance.

So, we can conclude Tom Arnold would deliver Hamlet more accurately than Sir Ian MacKellen ...

[clackers]

Taxes in Britain were around 12 times higher than the taxes in our colonies in North America.

Yes, and remember the average guy in Manchester was no more represented in Parliament than the average guy in Boston, Blackleaf!

[Ironduke]

You seceded from the Crown and thought that a spiffing wheeze, but what a great tizzy you made when the Confederacy wanted to do the same less than a century later. Can't you even try to be a little more consistent?

We didn't secede as we weren't a constituent nation of the Kingdom of Great Britain.

[Ray]

Well , the English members should start this purity campaign in their homeland ;) . About a year ago a Englishman became a customer to my employer. Came in several times , spoke with impossible accent and luckily was a good-humoured man , because everybody kept asking him (unintenionally) ´Sorry , do You speak English?´

I'm sorry? Excuse me? Come again? I beg your pardon?

[Ray]

Common Errors in English

So says this American book!

[Roosveltrepub]

I can't remember if we've ever had this "what if?" before, and it seems appropriate given the date today (July 4th).

What if the relatively few hotheads in the Colonies had been overridden by the majority of their fellows who wanted to remain part of the British Empire, and the American War of Independence had never happened?

I'm not heading in any particular direction, I'm just kind of interested in the discussion. How would things have looked through the last 230 years? No American Civil War? A different Civil War? Millions of American dead in WWI maybe? No difference at all?

-dale

Wouldn't the civil war have started when the Brits outlawed slavery
Where do you get the majority of new Englanders were against the war?
I'd guess the ultimate outcome would of been apushing together of Russia and germany or germany, russia and france to be counter to the hegomonic UK