It doen't matter how many years I've been learning English (over 20 years) you guys still are capable of amazing me. I don't want to sound a bit odd, but sometimes I wonder how do you guys understand each other?. The RP English sounds SO DIFFERENT from English spoken on the street, like SOOOOOOOOO ************G DIFFEREEEENT do you guys realize that or it's only foreigners? thousands of accents, lot of people pronounces certain words different, etc... It is so impossible to call oneself bilingual, actually impossible.
No, we know it too. It used to be much worse, by the way. Local dialects have become considerably less diverse since the widespread use of TV. Maybe radio, though that had less effect. If you went back 100 years, you could travel merely dozens of miles and encounter mutually unintelligable dialects. Not just different accents and some changes in pronunciation, but full on dialects. English is more homogenous now than in most of the past. I think English
might have been homogenous in the early middle ages, before it came to Britain, but it soon got thrown into a thousand different pots and stewed with different ingredients to different degrees. Throw in some Old Norse, some Latin, some French, some Brythonic languages, some Greek (but different amounts of each in different parts of the country), add in some extra letters for fun, add in a millenia of parochialism so the cooking is different in different parts of the country, then radically change the pronunciation of vowels (but to different extents in different parts of the country) and the meaning of some words (but different words in different parts of the country and different meanings for the same word in different parts of the country), then simmer for a few centuries...and you get modern English! Or Englishes
Then there's spelling, which adds a whole new level of confusion. Some of it's due to that change in pronunciation of vowels ("the great vowel shift") because the spelling of only some words changed to reflect the changes in pronunciation. Many words are still spelled in a way that matches the pre-change pronunciation and aren't even close to matching the current pronunciation. Some of it's just because that's how English is. Ever wondered why "blood" is pronounced "blud" despite there clearly being a double o, which should be pronounced as a long 'o'? It's because it used to be pronounced as a long 'o'. 'blood', rhymes wth 'mood'. But not any more for some reason. There's a bit of linguistics joke about 'ghoti' being a correct spelling of 'fish'. There are English words in which 'gh' is pronounced as 'f', words in which 'o' is pronounced as a short 'i' and words in which 'ti' is pronounced as 'sh'. For example: Enou
gh, w
omen and func
tion. ghoti. Pronounced "fish"
Incidentally, "squire" originally meant a person who was a personal assistant to a knight. It was a respected position, quite often held by people who would become knights. A squire served a knight, but often effectively as an apprentice. A squire as a boy, a knight as a man. Even if that wasn't the case, it was still a good position. An early version of a "gentlemen's gentleman", in a way. The meaning of the word has changed several times. I'm sure that doesn't surprise you with English
English a weird language. I'm glad I learned it when I was too young to know any different.
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