@Renauda said in Speakes thou even English, brether?:
@Aqua-Letifer
I can remember as a kid when my grandfather and his brothers and sisters would get together and converse in their West Yorkshire dialects. All were born in the late 1800’s and grew I no England. My father could understand them but really couldn’t speak it with any real fluency. It was English but at the same time it wasn’t English - I understood very little other than few words and common expressions that my father would use from time to time.
Theirs is the truer English. Pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, word order—it's all a lot closer to Anglo-Saxon than what we consider modern English to be today.
Speaking of which, it may interest @Jolly (if he doesn't know this already) that there are a handful of quirks of English in the American south that are unique with respect to the rest of the country, but are Old English holdovers. Couple of examples:
"Reach" pronounced as usual, but "reached" pronounced "wretched". Or maybe "het" instead of "heated." These are strong verbs, in which the vowel sound changes depending on the tense. (Weak verbs, by contrast, just have an "ed" ending to indicate tense.) This is an Anglo-Saxon holdover that the Scots and Irish immigrants retained. Our language used to have more strong verbs than weak ones. Now it's the opposite. Thanks, Normans.
"Stacked modals" like "might could" are seen as wrong today, because we let silly Latin fetishists write our grammar books. But this was a feature of the language, not a bug.
Adding "a" before a verb, like "a-fixin' to" is a holdover from when prefixes would change their meaning. We still use plenty of these: overmuch, become, prevent, etc. It's just that there are a few more examples in the American South.
A
