When did Think become Fink.

[WokenUpEarly]

Genuine question, taking out any speech issues, when did Think become Fink?
Throw become Frow?
Etc

@EBearhug

don’t develop the muscles to say it.Do you mean the muscle memory?

I'd assume actual muscles in your mouth and tongue - which is probably partly why speaking foreign languages can be so tiring, as you have to make different sounds.

You don't need stronger muscles to speak 'foreign languages'

You don't need stronger muscles to speak 'foreign languages'

not stronger ones, but different ones. I definitely feel it if I speak one of my 4 languagues more than usual. and in different regions of the mouth, i.e dutch more in the back of the tongue, english more the front, french front of whole face...

It’s regional. DP does it. Wouldn’t it be boring if we all spoke the same?

You need different muscles. Or to use them differently, plus I suspect decades of speaking one language will partly shape your mouth, like repetitive manual work can show in archaeological skeletons (not just in archaeology; that's just where I know about it from.)

You could be mega fit, but if you only run, you're still likely to feel saddle sore when you first take up cycling.

Your tongue is one big muscle, and along with the muscles in your cheeks and lips, you use it to shape the spaces in your mouth which create all the different sounds of speech. Different languages have some different sounds and do need some different muscle use, however minor it might seem.

Surely the 'finkers' watch tv, listen to radio - where people are mainly speaking with a th and f correctly. Some having American etc accents.

Seems odd that someone's experience is so restricted to a certain accent that you can't speak differently if you want.
We moved from north to south UK and my DCs did pick up the new accent at different rates.

I thought these kinds of attitudes to regional accents died out in the 80s? Obviously not. A regional accent is not down to lack of the correct mouth muscles ffs.

@Marmitecrackers

Sorry but I agree it's lazy speech and sounds uneducated.

I've noticed general standards slipping. There is a BBC reported that has just started who has a terrible accent. What happened to striving and us looking up to people on TV.

What happened to question marks?

I also wonder where all the t's have gone. I'm hearing the word 'photo' without the letter 't' all of the time and it drives me crazy.

@Lunaballoon

It baffles me when people (excluding non native English speakers) say they can’t pronounce th at the start of a word yet when it’s at the end, such as b-a-th, it doesn’t seem to cause such problems.

But they don’t. My parental grandparents, born in London in the 1920s, would say “baaaf.”

@EBearhug

You need different muscles. Or to use them differently, plus I suspect decades of speaking one language will partly shape your mouth, like repetitive manual work can show in archaeological skeletons (not just in archaeology; that's just where I know about it from.)

You could be mega fit, but if you only run, you're still likely to feel saddle sore when you first take up cycling.

Your tongue is one big muscle, and along with the muscles in your cheeks and lips, you use it to shape the spaces in your mouth which create all the different sounds of speech. Different languages have some different sounds and do need some different muscle use, however minor it might seem.

I'm a former SALT and we learnt Gray's Anatomy verbatum at college

linguistics.ucla.edu/people/ladefoge/manual%20files/appendixb.pdf

*Surely the 'finkers' watch tv, listen to radio - where people are mainly speaking with a th and f correctly. Some having American etc accents.

Seems odd that someone's experience is so restricted to a certain accent that you can't speak differently if you want*

I am in my 40’s. The access to tv and radio to the extent we have now is relatively recent. In my youth we had 3 channels. Very little kids tv, so again that key childhood development phase we watched at most half an hour a day. The rest was boring adult stuff we didn’t pay much attention to.

Much of it was also regional. Itv for ages was more like local radio. Radio itself was only really listened to in the car or at home- they weren’t portable.

I moved around a lot as a kid. My parents weren’t local to the areas I grew up in, and neither were they local to the the area their parents grew up in. So I heard everything from irish to northeastern to brummie to RP. I have an “ear” for accents and can mimic and pinpoint to regions fairly easily.

Dh on the other hand comes from a family that has been in S London for generations. Everyone in has family has the same accent. As did his school friends and nearly everyone he met for 30 odd years. He hasn’t developed that ear for the different sounds.

This and future generations may be different with easy access to tv from all over the world. In fact my own kids, despite growing up in S London have neutral accents as their school was very multicultural and everyone had a different accent.

My DM was from Welsh Borders moved to London in her 20s.
Her accent did change and used to get broader when she went home, but she never lost her "yer" and "tuth"

Surely the 'finkers' watch tv, listen to radio - where people are mainly speaking with a th and f correctly. Some having American etc accents.

What a weird comment. Most people on TV don't have a Birmingham accent, or a Geordie, Lancastrian, South Welsh, or an Edinburgh accent, and yet of course those accents still exist. Having an accent (which absolutely everyone does) doesn't mean you've never hear anyone speak differently

@Msloverlover

I thought these kinds of attitudes to regional accents died out in the 80s? Obviously not. A regional accent is not down to lack of the correct mouth muscles ffs.

I think most people - not all, but most - have got the message that you're not supposed to say that, say, a Durham accent makes someone 'sound thick' and is 'uneducated', but for reason they feel it's fine to do it about an Estuary accent. As a poster said upthread it's clearly about class, and about a particular view of the southern working classes, who for whatever reason are less romanticised and more despised by people who consider themselves liberal.

And people can train themselves out of their natural accents, in many cases - as I said upthread, my Essex accent only appears when I'm drunk now. But I don't really see why they should have to, or why it makes so many people on this thread angry that they don't.

@OwlBeThere I wouldn't say the F-Th is a Yorkshire thing. None of my very strongly accented family and friends do it.

@CorianderLord I did explain in a further post I’d missed a word, it was meant to read Old Yorkshire English.

It hasn’t changed. Fink is for idiots. It isn’t a word. Just like saying “ I done this, I done that” 🤮🤮 instead of “ I did this and I did that.

@SuzieQQQ

It hasn’t changed. Fink is for idiots. It isn’t a word. Just like saying “ I done this, I done that” 🤮🤮 instead of “ I did this and I did that.

its obvious who the idiot is on this thread

@Straven123
Surely the 'finkers' watch tv, listen to radio - where people are mainly speaking with a th and f correctly. Some having American etc accents.

It's generally not that people with working class southeastern accents don't know that people from different areas speak differently. In the same way, northerners hear a lot of southern Received Pronunciation on the TV and radio, but that doesn't mean they all start saying "bahth" and "grahss". Or even that they should. I really think it's worth giving some thought as to why some accents are considered legitimate and others not. Is a Scouse accent not legitimate? Some Scousers pronounce their Ks and hard Cs differently to the majority. What about people in the West Country who pronounce a hard R in words like car and park? Should they say cah and pahk because, to them, that's how the majority in England sound when they say it?

Also, as you mentioned your DCs picking up accents, children find it much easier to pick up new accents (and whole new languages for that matter) than adults, which is to do with brain plasticity. Adults find it harder, to varying degrees.

But pronouncing th as f isn't an accent more a mispronunciation.

Which is why it aggravates some people more than bat, baaht.
Some people don't pronounce loch but say lock, it's a mispronunciation not an accent.

But pronouncing th as f isn't an accent more a mispronunciation. It's part of an accent. Part of an accent which has a different vowel system from another.

@Straven123

But pronouncing th as f isn't an accent more a mispronunciation.

Which is why it aggravates some people more than bat, baaht.
Some people don't pronounce loch but say lock, it's a mispronunciation not an accent.

It is part of a London accent, no different from my Welsh DM pronouncing Here as Yer

Some people don't pronounce loch but say lock, it's a mispronunciation not an accent. English accents don't have the ch sound in their phonology because they don't need it in English English. Whereas Scottish English does have the ch sound in many words especially place names. Lock Lomond does sound very jarring to the Scottish ear but it is not due to ignorance or stupidity.