Why do American's pronounce herbs as 'erbs?

by yadda yadda 2 48 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Elsewhere

  Cause 'round here we speak 'Merican!
• 

  rebel8

  Why do Brits pronounce pasta as though it rhymes with Shasta?
• 

  Robdar

  I want to know why Brits would name something "spotted dick." And then eat it.
• 

  hamilcarr

  H-dropping

  H-dropping is a linguistic term used to describe the omission of initial /h/ in words like house, heat, and hangover in many dialects of English, such as Cockney and Estuary English. The same phenomenon occurs in many other languages, such as Serbian, and Late Latin, the ancestor of the modern Romance languages. Interestingly, both French and Spanish acquired new initial [h] in mediæval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping (however it should be noted that some dialects of Spanish re-acquired /h/ from Spanish /x/). Many dialects of Dutch also feature h-dropping, particularly the south western variants. It is also known from several Scandinavian dialects, for instance Älvdalsmål .

  It is debated amongst linguists which words originally had an initial /h/ sound. Words such as horrible, habit and harmony all had no such sound in their earliest English form nor were they originally spelt with an h, but it is now widely considered incorrect to drop the /h/ in the pronunciation. [ 1 ]

  H-dropping in English is found in all dialects in the weak forms of function words like he, him, her, his, had, and have; and, in most dialects, in all forms of the pronounit — the older form hit survives as the strong form in a few dialects such as Southern American English and also occurs in the Scots language. Because the /h/ of unstressed have is usually dropped, the word is usually pronounced /?v/ in phrases like should have, would have, and could have. These are usually spelled out as "should've", "would've", and "could've".
• 

  John Doe

  I want to know why Brits would name something "spotted dick." And then eat it.

  You wouldn't?
• 

  Robdar

  You wouldn't?

  Eat a SPOTTED dick? No way.

  I think that if I even saw a spotted dick, I would have to go to my ob/gyn just to make sure that some of it hadn't jumped off on me.
• 

  John Doe

  I wonder what Dalmations look like. . .
• 

  parakeet

  British: P.G. "Wodehouse" pronounced "Woodhouse."

  British: "St. John" pronounced "Sin-Jin."

  British: "Aquinas" pronounced "AH-quin-ah."

  British: "Maria" pronounced "Mar-EYE-ah."

  British: "Americans" pronounced "Illiterate, vulgar colonials who don't know how to drink a cup of tea properly."
• 

  rebel8

  LOL I had to look that one up. There are reasons I've never visited the British Isles, and they're all gastronomical.

  Spotted dick is a steamed suetpudding containing dried fruit (usually currants), commonly served with either custard or butter and brown sugar. Spotted refers to the dried fruit (which resemble spots) and Dick may be a contraction/corruption of the word pudding (from the last syllable) or possibly a corruption of the word dough.
• 

  Robdar

  Hehheee Rebel, we were offered spotted dick while in England and because of the name I just couldn't bring myself to eat it.

  While in the World Market yesterday, I saw a can of Heinz microwavable spotted dick and still couldn't bring myself to try it.