'Hwaet' is the word that became 'what' in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced. For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is 'Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum'. The original form for at least some of those words is to start with 'hw'. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)? Vocabulary differences ('a tin of tuna' for 'a can of tuna') and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.Īustralian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. > such differences are primarily differences in accent

One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ('a can of tuna') and can ('I can do that') don't rhyme (I believe 'can' is actually the wrong word in AE for 'a can of tuna', but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning).

There's always more out there than we're aware of. > Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now. * According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. * Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change. * I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (. * In the 'words that begin with an n' category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it ( (fruit)#Etymology)

Very interesting article with cool examples.

Battle of arausio pronunciation