"Snapshots" of English pronunciation

[paul718]

Cool.  I love stuff like this.  Though I wish the "1650 to 1750" pronunciation wasn't in an American accent, which is per se anachronistic. 

[paul718]

Cool.  I love stuff like this.  Though I wish the "1650 to 1750" pronunciation wasn't in an American accent, which is per se anachronistic. 

Not so fast; the modern American accent is closer to the 1650-1750 English pronunciations than the vast majority of the modern English accents.

Really? 

So when the colonists came over, they sounded more "American" than "British"?  And it was actually the Brits who developed an accent, rather than the Americans?

[paul718]

Where is the rawest, least corrupted dialect of English spoken?  Scotland?

[paul718]

Now, the closest living relative of English is Frisian, but it has undergone a number of changes, some making it similar to English, some making it different.  Icelandic is pretty close to what the Anglo-Saxons were speaking 1000 years ago.

Here's a video of a guy using Old English to try and communicate with a Frisian. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34

Especially the part where the farmer says, "You want to milk her...You want the brown cow in England to milk."  Though I think he might actually be trying to speak English there.