Archaisms

Differences in pronunciation

Differences of spelling.

The reform in the English spelling for American English was introduced by the famous American lexicographer Noah Webster who published his first dictionary in 1806. Those of his proposals which were adopted in the English spelling are as follows:

a) the delition of the letter «u» in words ending in «our», e.g. honor, favor;

b) the delition of the second consonant in words with double consonants, e.g. traveler, wagon,

c) the replacement of «re» by «er» in words of French origin, e.g. theater, center,

d) the delition of unpronounced endings in words of Romanic origin, e.g.

catalog, program,

e) the replacement of «ce» by «se» in words of Romanic origin, e.g. defense, offense,

d) delition of unpronounced endings in native words, e.g. tho, thro.

In American English we have r-coloured fully articulated vowels, in the combinations: ar, er, ir, or, ur, our etc. In BE the sound / / corresponds to the AE /^/, e.g. «not». In BE before fricatives and combinations with fricatives «a» is pronounced as /a:/, in AE it is pronounced / / e.g. class, dance, answer, fast etc.

There are some differences in the position of the stress:

BE AE BE AE

add`ress adress la`boratory `laboratory

re`cess `recess re`search `research

in`quiry `inquiry ex`cess `excess

Some words in BE and AE have different pronunciation, e.g.

BE AE BE AE

/`fju:tail/ /`fju:t l/ /`dousail / /dos l/

/kla:k/ /kl rk/ /`fig / /figyer/

/ `le3 / / li:3 r/ /lef`ten nt/ /lu:tenant/

/ nai / /ni: r/ /shedju:l/ /skedyu:l/

But these differences in pronunciation do not prevent Englishmen and American from communicating with each other easily and cannot serve as a proof that British and American are different languages.

Words can be classified according to the period of their life in the language. The number of new words in a language is always larger than the number of words which come out of active usage. Accordingly we can have archaisms, that is words which have come out of active usage, and neologisms, that is words which have recently appeared in the language.

Archaisms are words which are no longer used in everyday speech, which have been ousted by their synonyms. Archaisms remain in the language, but they are used as stylistic devices to express solemnity.

Most of these words are lexical archaisms and they are stylistic synonyms of words which ousted them from the neutral style. Some of them are: steed /horse/, slay /kill/, behold /see/, perchance /perhaps/, woe /sorrow/ etc.

Sometimes a lexical archaism begins a new life, getting a new meaning, then the old meaning becomes a semantic archaism, e.g. «fair» in the meaning «beautiful» is a semantic archaism, but in the meaning «blond» it belongs to the neutral style.

Sometimes the root of the word remains and the affix is changed, then the old affix is considered to be a morphemic archaism, e.g. «beautious» /»ous» was substituted by «ful»/, «bepaint» / «be» was dropped/, «darksome» /»some» was dropped/, «oft» / «en» was added/. etc.

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