Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Freakzilla wrote:The Confederacy was just before it's time, it should have had robots instead.

SandRider wrote:

Mandy wrote:Very few Southerners were rich enough to own slaves.

My research and personal experience is that this idea is a rather recent one, in response
to the Civil Rights movement, the ending of segregation (in the North as well as the
South), the reparations issue, white guilt, &etc.

The last Slave Schedule filed with the Census Bureau in 1856 shows that a rather large proportion
of Southern households owned at least one slave. My second great-grandfather, a minor
planter in central Alabama before The War, owned eight. (These people also moved with
the family from Alabama to Mississippi in 1866, and to Arkansas by 1869. To this day, in the
county where he settled, you can find white and black families with the same family name.)

(this, BTW, does not indicate inter-marriage between the families, but the common practice
of slaves taking their master's family name after The War, as most slaves stayed where they
were and became sharecroppers on the same fields. Taking the former master's last name was
a form of protection & subservience)

I bring that up because I have heard for many years white people in the South saying,
"I don't owe them nothing, my family was too poor to own slaves." After doing a ton of
genealogical research in confirming membership applications for the Sons of Confederate
Veterans, I can almost guarantee you I can turn up a slave-holder in your tree....

sho' nuff.

SandRider wrote:

white Southerners try to claim their dialect comes from Scottish or English dialects even though no Scottish or English dialects sound like the Southern US dialect,

whoever wrote that was a total idiot.
(maybe this was the same person who keeps trying to convince you the Nazis were 'left-wing' ?)

Chig can confirm this, but most linguists consider the American Southern "accent" to be a
form of Scottish dialect.

rich whitey letting the house slaves raise their kids who copied the speech of the slaves

read that back to yourself out loud ....

The English language came to America by way of English speakers, on boats. Because of the varying nature of English accents in Great Britain, the sort of people who were on these boats and when they left turns out to be very significant linguistically. The first wave of settlers came from southern England. They were slow talkers and had the stubborn sort of accent that refuses to pronounce the supposedly disgusting 'r' sound (some Americans inherited this trait and declared that the US would never be civilised until it totally got rid of the horrible 'r' sound from its speech). In not very much time at all, settlers from England had claimed the prized Tidewater area and built their coastal plantations, and there wasn't much land left for new settlers.

Nevertheless, from 1717-1800, English speaking people from Scotland and Northern Ireland (the Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish) came to America and went down river channels to settle further inland. The inland areas did not have soil as fertile as that near the coastal lands, and there were greater problems with transportation. The Scots-Irish people settled along the Allegheny Mountains, the Piedmont Plateau and the Appalachian Mountains. These settlers knew how to pronounce the 'r' sound and did so enthusiastically. For many years, two Southern accents developed independently.

The vocabulary of coastal Southerners was influenced by African-American slaves (and eventually slave descendants), who were abundant around the Atlantic coast. In turn, African-Americans became influenced by Southern speech and developed a fairly uniform English speech pattern similar to Southern speech in vowel use and with respect to the 'r' sound. The inland settlers did not have the sort of land that would support a plantation, and therefore had few, if any, slaves. The Scots- Irish vernacular along the Appalachian mountains did not change much over time, and some scholars contend that Appalachian, or 'hillbilly' talk is very close to what Elizabethan English would have sounded like. The hillbilly use of the 'r' sound eventually came to overtake the coastal revulsion of the 'r'. Now it is more common for Southerners to pronounce their 'r's. Nevertheless, some vestiges remain. It is not uncommon for Southerners to make a post-vocal 'r' drop in words like 'bastud' (bastard) and 'baun' (born). On the other hand, African-Americans popularly retain their 'r' loss and are more likely to pronounce words like 'fo', 'flo' and 'mo' (for, floor and more, respectively). What's more, African-American English tends to be fairly consistent throughout the country. So African- American communities in cities with vastly different dialects such as Philadelphia, Boston and New Orleans would all speak in roughly the same dialect - heavily influenced by coastal Southern talk from centuries past.

Still today, Appalachian, or 'hillbilly' dialect is distinctive from the dialect of the speech of the rest of the South. People from around the Appalachian mountains have words unknown to the rest of the country which have Scottish and Irish origin. They also use words that etymologists are at a loss to explain. The best explanation for those words is that the hillbillies simply made them up.

The Appalachian/Ozark dialect, a close cousin of the Southern dialect5, is sometimes known as the 'Hillbilly' accent. Most of its true adherents are low income, uneducated people in and around the Ozark mountains and the Appalachian mountains. It is associated with a rural or blue collar lifestyle, and is not dissimilar to the 'redneck' manner of speech that characterises many farmers throughout America, from sea to shining sea. While being called a 'hillbilly' or 'redneck' generally carries negative connotations, there are those who are quite proud of that distinction.

It is known among other things for putting the vowel 'a' where it doesn't belong. Specifically, you'll often see an 'a' in front of an '-ing' word (and the 'g' sound will disappear as well). For example, 'Hold on, I'm a-comin' fellers.' A good example of this kind of dialect is the theme song of the old TV show 'The Beverly Hillbillies' (as well as the dialogue on the show itself)-

Come and listen to a story 'bout a man named Jed
Purr mountaineer burrly kept his fam-lee fed
Then one day he was shootin' at some food,
And up through the ground come a-bubblin' crude
(Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea)

The Appalachian accent is strongly related to the Scots-Irish who settled around the Appalachian mountains in the early part of the 18th century. Some of the odd words that are used in the Ozarks and around Appalachia have Scottish or Irish origin. There are also many similarities between the Appalachian/Ozark dialect and the Southern accent. But the Appalachian is the much stronger accent, with its own subtle characteristics. For one thing, you seem to hear the word 'possum' more when speaking to hillbillies than in any other dialect.

Texas is an enormous place. It is the second largest state in size and second largest state in population. It was once an independent country (the Lone Star Republic) and actually has several very diverse regions. It would be folly to lump a state like Texas in with the rest of the American South without further explanation. Researchers have found that proud Texans are more likely to adopt the 'Texas Twang' that characterizes their state. Texans who hate Texas are more likely to have a flat, plain accent. In this sense, the Texas accent appears to be one of choice, relative to social identity.

First, there are east Texans, where much oil is produced, or as they will pronounce it, 'all'. Their drawl is thick and is more similar to the speech of residents of the 'Deep South'. It is more like the standard Southern accent than other Texas dialects.

Next come west Texans, who act like cowboys and have the boots and hats to prove it. They also talk like cowboys. Or rather, the popular image of the cowboy has been shaped by Hollywood through TV shows and movies, who hired Texans to teach their film stars how to speak with the west Texas 'twang' which seemed to fit with the cowboy image. Bob Hinkle, an influential West Texan speaking coach in Hollywood once said, 'In Texas, yew don’t say near as many words, but yew git it said, an’ yew slow it down to where people kin understan’ it.'6 When British actor Michael Caine had to imitate a west Texas accent for a movie role, he had this to say -

It's a frame of mind. Texans talk slowly. And the reason they talk slowly, is because they're usually about six feet tall and have a gun. And they know you're listening! And they're not in a hurry to do anything. It's a very hot place. It's a very big place, and it can be a very lonely place. So they don't talk very much. And when they do, they make sure you listen. And it's a very lazy sort of voice.

When I was learning the accent, my teacher, my dialogue coach said to me, let's hear your accent now. I did the accent, and he said, that's the Texas accent. With an English rhythm! He said, each word is standing up on its own, separately. The Texas language is lazy, he said. The words all lean on each other, just-like-this. Everything, the words just about fall over. And each word hits the other one. And that's how it comes about. That's it! It's easy. It took me three months to do that.

The drawl of Texas is similar to the rest of the South (without the dropped 'r' sound that some Southerners carry), stretched by diphthongization. However, Texans are not above 'monophthongization' which doesn't usually happen elsewhere in the South. A word like 'hire' in most American accents would be phonetically pronounced 'high-urr', but Texans flatten it out to one vowel sound, which comes out like 'harr'. In the same way, 'fire' and 'far' are homonyms in a Texan accent. Also, while most of the South would pronounce the words 'caught' and 'cot' differently, Texans pronounce them with a flat 'kawt' sound.

The Texan accent is actually something of a mix between the plain dialect of the American west, the drawling dialect of the American South, and oddly enough, Spanish from Mexican immigrants. There are subtle variations in accents throughout the state, mainly due to geographic factors like proximity to the three influences listed.

There are more than a few well-known Texas accents. Tommy Lee Jones, born in a small town in central Texas, has a strong and authentic Texan accent. Mike Judge, a resident of Austin, Texas, voices several characters for his animated television show 'King of the Hill' with a great Texas accent.

SandRider wrote:
the source, BTW : idiots @the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A30501695" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

this was found in a matter of seconds using BING!,
which, BTW, is no fucking different whatsoever than google.

one of a whole slew of sources & citations saying the same thing:
the Southern "accent" is an evolution of Ulster-Scot, and if you'll
re-read my posts, you'll see I said that certainly Southern Speech
was, has been, and is being influenced by Black Americans, but
Black Americans are not the "source & origin" of the Southern "accent".

all this shouldn't really be too difficult to understand -
the African slaves didn't arrive here speaking English -
it was taught to them by Southerners.

I guess I should take offense at your attacking me, accusing me of
all this racism to the point that I would "twist history to fit
my prejudices", but I've heard that kind of bullshit all my life in
discussions with people ignorant of the South, some of whom had actually
been in the South.

I guess I should I take offense at you accusing me of homophobia,
but I think you know better,

and besides, you just so cute
when you get all riled up.

nothing wrong with that. get pissed off, call me mean names, flame
away. you're just wrong about the Language thing, and it's not your
fault, it's one of those misconceptions that fit somebody else's
agenda (racist or otherwise) and has been passed around for many years.

chanilover wrote:Patronising old goat.

Freakzilla wrote:

chanilover wrote:Patronising old goat.

Title/Rank suggestion?

Eru wrote:How did this thread turn into a discussion about racism?