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=====精彩回顧===
美國何時失去了英國口音
Ok, so I got a lot of grief in the comments of my video about sneakerhead moms for the way I pronounced Adidas. The Seeker Daily team spent a lot of time talking about this because Adidas is the way we all normally say it. All of us except one, my amazing coworker Aneeta Akhurst, who happens to be British,says “Adidas” instead of Adidas, and I
have to admit it does sound pretty cool - and we generally spend a lot of time marvelling at the way she says things. It got me wondering- when did the British give way to the seriously-less-cool American accent? Well, the first thing to say about this is that there are many different accents for both Brits and Americans, and as we’ll see a number of them have similar qualities.
由于我Adidas的發音問題，我的視頻受到許多人的抨擊。Seeker Daily團隊曾經多次探討這個問題，因為正常情況下Adidas是這樣發音的。所有人，除了我的同事Aneeta Akhurst之外，她剛好是英國人，她的發音是這樣的，我不得不承認聽上去非常酷——我們經常花費大量時間驚嘆她的發音方式。這讓我思考——英國口音什么時候給不那么酷的美國口音讓步的？首先要說的就是，英國人和美國人都有許多各種各樣的口音，我們會看到兩者在這一點上是類似的。
We don’t have any recordings the early 17th century, when Brits started to come en masse to American shores, but we’re safe in assuming that “Americans” and British of that time shared the same way of speaking. By the time of our earliest audio wax recordings, almost 300 years later, the United States accent was decidedly different from that of our English cousins. It seems the separation of accents is as much a result of what happened in the UK as in the US. One of the most notable differences between the two accents is the way we pronounce the letter “R”. In America, most of us pronounce the ‘r’ in words like hard, card, ever, water, and dare, but Brits say “hard, card,ever, water, and dare”. This is the difference between what called “rhotic” and “non-rhotic” speech. The interesting thing is that the first British that came to America did pronounce their ‘r’s and it wasn’t until later in Britain, around 1800, that the non-rhotic speech became popular among the upper classes in the south of England and eventually became the pronunciation that was taught in schools.
我們沒有17世紀初期的任何錄音，當時英國人開始大舉遷往美國海岸，但是保險起見，我們假設那時的美國人和英國人口音是一樣的。到了我們最早的錄音錄像資料，大約300年后，美國口音已經與英國口音出現明顯不同。似乎口音的分化很大程度上是英國和美國歷史事件的影響。兩種口音之間一個最顯著的差別就是字母“R”的發音。在美國，比如hard, card, ever, water和dare等單詞中r的發音就和英國不同。這就是輔音前的r發音和不發音的差別。有趣的是，遷往美國的第一個英國人說話時“r”確實發音，直到后來，大約1800年，英格蘭南部上層社會輔音前的r不發音的方式越來越流行，最終學校也開始這樣教。
Of course, there are some accents in the UK-- like those of Ireland and Scotland -- which are rhotic, and there are those in America- like in Boston and places in the south -- that are non-rhotic and don’t pronounce the ‘r’.
當然，英國一些地方的口音——比如愛爾蘭和蘇格蘭——這些地區輔音前的r發音，美國也有一些地方——比如波士頓和南方某些地區，輔音前的r不發音。
So the interesting thing here is that Brits may have more to do with the difference in accents than Americans do. In other words,it’s not our fault.
所以，有趣的是，英國人或許與口音的不同有更多的關系。換句話說，并不是美國人的錯。
