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Comment by gggggggg | Hacker News Reader

I am in Australia, and we say 'Mum' not 'Mom'. Does anyone know why?

I have always found Mom weird.

Just one of those words with several different regional pronunciations.

If you can believe Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... - Mom is sporadically regionally found in the UK (e.g., in West Midlands English). Some British and Irish dialects have mam,[117] and this is often used in Northern English, Hiberno-English, and Welsh English. Scottish English may also use mam, ma, or maw. In the American region of New England, especially in the case of the Boston accent, the British pronunciation of mum is often retained, while it is still spelled mom. In Canada, there are both mom and mum; Canadians often say mum and write mom.[118] In Australia and New Zealand, mum is used. In the sense of a preserved corpse, mummy is always used.

Just one of many pronunciation drifts that occurred between the UK and its American colonies at some point between 1620 and 1788. Largely it seems the Americans kept the old pronunciations while the mother country changed theirs, which is why the English of Shakespeare's time sounds a bit American.

That's a long drift from the original Klingon

It's not quite like that. American pronunciation change as well. Here's an example of how linguist reconstruct the original pronunciation of Shakespeare plays: http://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s

It really has more elements that sound like West Country accent, Irish English, or even Scots/Ulster Scots.

No, American-English changed too.

Shakespeare doesn't sound a bit American and language has been changing since 1788 as well.

This claim is generally made less about Standard American or General American and more about regional Appalachian dialects. Even this is a myth. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002699.h... http://lrc.ohio.edu/lrcmedia/Streaming/lingCALL/ling270/myth...

English and American dialects both originated in (Shakespearean) Early Modern English, but both have changed over time, as languages do.

To my ears an Appalachian accent doesn't sound that different to a regular American accent, it's just an exaggerated version of it.

I say Mum in the US. I don't think there's a hard or fast rule.

I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules in the English language. It's all convention, some of which has a very high percentage of adherents, and some people in high towers claiming that one way is more correct than another. But you will find that every "rule" has some form in some region that breaks it. There's the concept of an official grammar and vocabulary in some languages, such as French, with the Académie française, but even then people don't follow the rules. English has no such official committee.

But do babies say that from the very first, when they're playing with sounds as the article says? I'm guessing not, they learn it after awhile.

Nah, it's more of a "ma" sound with a short "a".

Now what's interesting is that this sound is closer to how an American might pronounce a short "o" (I think of a southern belle fanning herself and saying "lawd it's haaaht") and how an Englishman might say a short "u". It's not exactly the same vowel but I can see how it develops.

Both versions of English think babies say "mama", but you can't shorten that to "mam" because you'd use a different "a" to pronounce that.

English has many dialects. American-English uses Mom. British-English (and Hiberno-, Australian-) uses Mum.

England?

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