None sounded American to me.

The American accent is laargely a descendant of the Irish accent.

❤

13:46 Some accents in Nova Scotia sound nearly identical, especially in “year” and “born”

Even without an internal dialogue, if you see that you don't have milk (or something that you wanted) and you go to the store to get some, there is the intention of going. It doesn't have to be words in your mind. It's the intention to walk out the door, go to the store and get it. I mostly don't think in words either. I can hear music in my mind if I've heard the same song a few times, but that's something else completely, I guess. I've never heard of qualia until now, but what you're saying here describes my experience in the world. I also have never believed in gods. It never made sense to me and it seems strange that so many people really believe it. Two of my brothers became Christians as adults, and I thought they were making it up - reasons unknown. It's possible for me to imagine spirits, but as shadows of people who were in a place over and over and left some kind of imprint, like if a picture is on a wall for years, and you move it, but there's a shadow of it still there . I used to see a woman in a black coat, carrying a shopping bag, walk around my porch to the kitchen door and I went to the door the first couple of times and there was no one there. I decided it must be that sort of thing; a woman had lived there for 50 years before she died and I bought the house. She would have walked there many times over the years. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me. It's off topic anyway. But I think my perception of the world is more like yours.

I'm only about half way through, but at 27:26 you mention the heart, and don't know if that would have any affect on your consciousness. My grandmother had a pacemaker put in her heart to regulate how it beat, and her personality changed after that. She knew it, and didn't like it. She said her dreams even changed after that. It was the same heart, but it was regulated by this device. I don't know if that counts but it did change her consciousness to some extent.

As an aside, I've often wondered what someone like Pepys or his relative contemporary diarist, Ralph Josselin, sounded like when I'm reading their words. Of course Pepys was more of an upper class city dweller, while Josselin was educated and lived near Cambridge. I imagine their accents would be rather different, although both men were well educated. How about a video contrasting a best guess of their respective accents?

I imagine you've heard the 1888 recording of Edison's associate, Colonel George Gouraud as he recorded Sir Arthur Sullivan. What's striking about the audio is that Gouraud is an American from New York and Sullivan was from South London, from a working to middle class area and their accents, at least to my ears, seem very similar. My working hypothesis has always been that accents were likely very regional, but I'm not sure how to reconcile their similar accents. I think the biggest difference between their speech in the audio and modern speech was the cadence. The pauses were very dramatic and exaggerated compared to modern speech. There were other people in the recordings and to my memory, their accents were similar to each other. In my opinion, they sounded more American than British. I'm nowhere near an expert on accents, so I could be way off base. I would be interested in your analysis of that old audio recording, specifically.

Very interesting, something I think I could have studied in my younger days. Early periods sound a mixture of Geordy and Swedish

Sounds like a liverpool accent.

bruh I watched this a long time ago and I actually thought you found a community of hippies in England

*Northern Ireland

1706 is where it becomes understandable without having to think about it too hard.

1:04 Please tell me this is a joke.

Speaker 4 sounds a lot like my great great aunt from New Hampshire. Especially the talking about the"fahm".

A rare channel where the comments are as good as the content. That's an easy subscribe then.

All i can hear is Geordie and Scottish haha

I pint of wine... that's an old way of life that badly needs to return.

Short story short? NO! The 'murkin' accent was primarily influenced by the Irish influx in the late 1800s. So sit down and shut up.

You should make a questionnaire to help you identify people who are conscious in a different way. For me, this video led me to think about how I experience things such as qualia. I do have a firmer belief than you in current knowledge regarding the function of cells and tissues, the neurological basis of the mind, since I'm in biology. But I came to the conclusion that nature of consciousness must come from some mix of internally and externally observable features. I can't for myself really identify the true nature of my own consciousness or where some of my own thoughts and actions come from. I can try and describe some kind of internal monologue about the nature of my experience, but it's certainly not the same thing. At the same time, inner monologue is so foundational to my life that I find it hard not to ascribe it the majority of my conscious experience. Thanks for the video.

I can understand this a decent bit as a fluent west-frisian

A lot of this is still used in Bristol.

Despite his incredible humility, John Harris is one of the most brilliant minds that English phonology has ever had. It's so nice to see a long-form interview with him. Simon - these videos are fantastic, I love how calm and contentful they are.

I agree with your prescription that the scientific disciplines of linguistics, anthropology etc. should be descriptive, an assertion which is self-contradictory and will not be resolved within the narrow epistemic echo chamber of empiricism. If morality is but a human construction & doesn't come from Transcendent Authority, then it's not moral but merely transactional, yet our own human nature constantly rejects this notion in our everyday experiences and interactions... That said, I would argue that the human sacrificer and the anti-human sacrificer are both attempting to serve the greater good, and both are rooted in a similar presumption of a pre-existing universal morality, however right or wrong we are in our specific notions of how to conform to it. Even "think" vs. "fink", while clearly arbitrary, may serve (locally, from parent to kid, not academically) a laudable goal of conferring membership into the group for the purpose of fostering cultural cohesion, social stability and human flourishing... Reducing the whole human being to an entity that can be described via the scientific method from some supposedly objective observational perspective is a fool's errand and will ultimately suffer from either an intellectual dead-end of rational incoherency or from a sheer exhaustion that can only conclude in nihilism...

How can you have audio recordings of people before the 1860s??

Why would you show yourslef immigating the accents with recording when you could just show the recordings?

Definitely a bit of a linguist

8:55 sounds like a German accent

This 1800s accent is almost scouser.

Looking forward to these

Does the adaptation of accent stem from the expectations of others around us?, and include the effects of social media in our accessibility? and the smokescreen of trying to seem as not as imperious? as we once viewed and expected the aristocracy to be?

Wow that was amazing. I was fascinated all the way through. Thankyou

Historical Yorkshire dialect would be interesting

I’m here from the 30th century. Great 👍🏾 info from this time capsule.

Hailaz, ik bin Alawardazmannaz!

I was today years old when I discovered that my idea of what a posh English accent sounds like is stuck in the 1920s lol.

5:49 OK, now can we talk about a “goose” / “fool” split, because those are two entirely different vowels in my (Australian) dialect.

Honestly, I think the main reason some people think “Irish” when they hear reconstructed 17th century London dialect is simply because those people aren’t as familiar with the West Country accent, which is the surviving accent that the reconstruction actually sounds the most like, IMO, as well as being an accent that one might logically expect it to sound a bit like, given its geographical proximity.

The pronunciation of pre-glotalised /t/ in [ɛʔt bɹɛd] would necessarily involve an ejective [t’] as the glottis is closed with no air coming from the lungs - such realisations in English are rare but they are present in some dialects (including some of those in the NW Midlands, e.g., south Lancashire). However, the usual pronunciation of [t] in final position, particularly before following plosives, consists of glotally-reinforced variants - [ɛtʔ] - even in standardised speech, or glottal replacement, [ɛʔ], this realisation being more common intervocalically than before following consonants.

Some people in Northumberland use strut for bull. My auntie used to say it like that. And for me, the vowels in goose, foot and book are different.

It amazed me how long the Norse Germanic twang remained in the sounds of the the London English sound. If this interpretation or he sounds of London English is correct, my own voice sounds did not appear till around the 1940s...

Very interesting but how on earth do you know the accents from the various eras??

Y ur thumbnail look like an album cover ?

i LOVE his accent