Re: [tied] Canadian and Anglo-Irish

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 7698
Date: 2001-06-20

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:

> ... If Canadian English were Irish-derived, it would surely show
other Anglo-Irish features as well.

I was thinking of "mainstream Canadian", but of course there's no
denying that Irish influence on a local scale can be detected here
and there in Canada. For example, some varieties of Newfoundland
English have strikingly clear laterals in all positions, a plosive
pronunciation of "th" resulting in merger with /t, d/, constructions
like "I'm after writing" for "I have written", etc. These, however,
are strictly local phenomena, with no tendency to spread.

Unrounded low back vowels (as in <lot>) are found in Irish as well as
North American Englishes, but they too can be regarded as an export
from southern England to BOTH Ireland and America. Conservative (and
recessive) southwestern and southeastern dialects still show
unrounded vowels, while in the intervening central area the influence
of London has led to the reintroduction of rounding. The distribution
of unrounding in the 19th-century (and earlier) English of England
was much wider than today.

Piotr