Howard Brazee wrote: > Mark A. Mandel wrote: > >> --- Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote: >> >>> I've read that the closest we will find to how Robin Hood spoke is >>> in the >>> back woods of Appalachia. >> >> >> A canard. (Quack, quack!) You can read all sorts of things, many of >> which will raise your >> hackles. >> > What candidates do you have that you think is closer and why? > The first question would be, which Robin Hood do you mean? There must have been more than a dozen, from 1066 to 1300 or so--but none of them would have been speaking anything but a dialect of Middle English or Old English, and not necessarily a dialect that survived into Elizabethan or Jacobean times. The next observation would be that much of Appalachia was settled after Culloden, ie, after 1745, when a lot of Scots took off for the New World. Not much of Robin Hood there, I'm afraid, and little more of Elizabeth. But there is a group of speakers who settled in the early 17th century & remained pretty isolated ever after: Chesapeake Bay islanders. Their accents are pretty distinct from the surrounding mainland & the stereotypical southern drawl. From what I read and hear, what you hear today on Smith or Tangiers Island is probably fairly close to what you might have heard in England around 1600-ish or so. How close, I don't know. But no matter how you slice it, it aint Robin Hood. Snarkhunter