Myth of Elizabethan English
One famous American language myth holds that English is still spoken exactly as it was in Shakespeare's time in a distant area of the Ozarks or possibly the Appalachians. That the first Europeans to arrive in this area were a homogenous population of Scotch-Irish and English is a myth that has been questioned and never proven. A recent public television documentary on the English language went so far as to situate an untouched-by-time community not in the mountains, but on the Sea Islands off the coast of North Carolina. Residents of the fishing village were shown speaking in quaint, old-fashioned tones to the audience. No language community, no matter how racially homogenous, could possibly have such a linguistic spring of youth. It doesn't matter how disconnected the speakers of a language are from the rest of the world, or how out-of-touch they appear to others, language never stops evolving. Sociolinguistics researchers Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian (1976) remind us that the language of any culture may be conservative in some ways, yet progressive in others, like Appalachian English. Appalachian, Ozark, and Sea Island dialects may preserve some elements of ancient English that have been lost by other dialects, but they also create sophisticated varieties of English that have not yet spread to other parts of the United States.
Language myths, like the story of Elizabethan English, serve to distinguish one kind of speech from another. Some folklore holds that language is a window into the speaker's soul. For example, it is widely held that city folk (or northerners) speak excessively quickly and nasally, and that their southern counterparts (or country people) speak slowly and drawlingly, which is considered to indicate a combination of sociability and diminished cerebral activity. The adjectives "nasality" and "drawl," which are regularly used to describe a person's voice, are always derogatory. When I was in college, a buddy of mine from central Illinois, whose accent to my then-untrained New York ears evoked the deadly-drawling cadence of antebellum Tara, likened the words of a Florida student we both knew to "bubbles gently oozing up through the swamps!" My coworker, an ivy league educated professor from the east coast, was recently described by central Illinoisans as a snobby if not downright nasal fellow professor at the University of Illinois. Yankee reportedly bemoaned the fact that his children were growing up with what he dubbed "that terrible midwestern nasal accent!'
A common theme in mythology is the dual role that language has in shaping our thinking and its ability to constrain it. In this approach, we can only imagine what words in our language can convey. If you have more words in your vocabulary, you have more options for how to use them. When we hear a piece of folklore, we may feel envious of the Eskimo people, who, in their language, have innumerable phrases for different types of snow, such as "falling snow," "snow on the ground," "drifting snow," and so on. On the other side, we can feel sorry for English speakers who only have snow and slush to speak of.
If we can connect with those who find it difficult to comprehend German because of the language's periodicity, we can better understand those who find it difficult to comprehend English because of the way it is structured. As a side note, they mention an unidentified, fictional primordial language that is said to prevent its speakers from developing any sense of time because it lacks the future tense.
These fallacies regarding the connection between language and cognition are rife with cultural prejudice. Despite the fact that the verb existed in many areas of the phrase in Old English without affecting comprehension, English speakers rarely examine their belief that the only natural way to think is to position the verb between the subject and the object, neither before or after. Our oldest forms of English, which did not include a separate future tense, never gave the original English people any difficulty in imagining the past, present, and future. Depending on the present tense, there are a variety of ways to describe what is yet to come in modern English: Thursday is the deadline for me to seal the deal: All future tenses require the inflection of shall or will, including those we refer to as future tense.
Also, people who value lexical diversity overlook the lack of a general phrase for "snow" in the Eskimo language, despite the language's many words for polar precipitation. A generic phrase for a camel does not exist in Arabic, despite the fact that there are many different types of camels. This does not indicate that Eskimo speakers are incapable of abstract thought, but rather that in the case of snow, species outweighs genus in terms of importance. Even though it's not quite identical or as picturesque, in American English we readily distinguish at least two score sorts of hamburgers by brand (Big Mac, Whopper) or type (pizzaburget; tunaburger), having less and less resort nowadays to the basic hamburger. No one sees this as evidence of modern overspecializing or concludes that the American concern with chopped meat approaches what we erroneously imagine to be the Eskimo fascination with weather.
