"Pronunciation" in Modern Tongue by Bill Bryson Reading Log

In this chapter by Bill Bryson, Bryson discusses the origins of pronunciation and how each language omits or include sounds, and vowels to construct their own. Bryson talks about the common vowels sounds in the English language that are represented, but not in others such as Chinese dialects, these words do not exist making it difficult to translate and pronounce. It was interesting to see part of the evolution of the English language through this chapter and how different cities and places become familiar with words and slur them without realizing it, and also form accents.

On page 87 Bryson talks about slurring words, which I thought interesting, because the mispronunciations where spelled out. "Hand bag comes out as "hambag". "Wash becomes "worsh". I'll just getbher becomes "aldges gedder". Pronunciation is intriguing because we may know the spelling of a word, and how it looks spelled correctly, but not pronounce the word correctly. Annunciation is also key to understanding language phonetically, because "I naw watchu me" is different from "I know what you mean".

On page 89, Bryson talks about Slurvian in Balamer(Baltimore) being the strongest. I can relate my own accent and slurring of words to an experience that I had in NawwLens(New Orleans). I didn't realize how strong my accent was until I started talking about the Mats(Mets) with somebody. They pronounced Mets (Meets), and when I heard myself I started laughing because people would tell me I had an accent, and I would be like "Am frome New Yawk...wha' are ju' talkin' abba??"

Some things I didn't understand where the differences between "American English" and English spoken by Englishmen if they are both English, why was Shakespeare said to have spoken American English??

And also if words were not misspelled by Kings and Queens alike to build of study of how words were pronounced then would we be misspelling, and mispronouncing words now??