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[gmjones]

Hi!

I'm doing a masters in linguistics and I'm doing a paper on phonetics, involving pronunciation maistakes made by German spekers. Does anyone know where Oxford English came from? All I can get on google scholar are links to documents related to the Oxford English dictionary!!

Cheers

[Der_Bomber]

Probably far too late but here goes with what I know from asking/ribbing Germans about 'Menchester United'. Hopefully it'll be of use to someone!

Oxford English was originally started when Oxford and Cambridge decided that the other Universities in the UK were starting to become a little bit too competitive, as well as this they wanted to distance themselves from another new invention of the time - rich working class people, which they saw as a fad. They wanted to continue creaming off the upper class, southern students, and let the new unis take the lower class northerners.

As such they needed a way to 'distinguish' themselves from the other Universities, and they conspired to create a new breed of English - an upper class patois, if you will, that would instantly let anyone that met an Oxbridge graduate know they were talking to an upper class, educated Gentleman.

Apparently this new version of English differed very little from standard (at the time) definitions of English, save for changing any 'a's in a word to 'e'. The only people that really 'picked up on it' were the visiting German upper classes, who of course were the other dominant rich European country of the time.

Following all this the very strong links between England and Germany began to shut down somewhat, culminating in the two world wars. The de-monarchification (a word i've probably just made up) led to a new middle class in the Prussian region of formally well educated peoples. These people all followed the 'oxford english' way to go about things and the lesser educated generally didn't know any better or hold much sway if they did.

As such it became common practice for Geermans to believe that the 'proper' way to speak English was the Oxford English way....

[stillnosheep]

....which, of course, it is.

[scot47]

Oxford of course because they were traditionally Royalists and the Kings' Men whereas those BOUNDERS at Cambridge had supported the GHASTLY regicide Cromwell.