You Yanks are weird.
Not as weird as Brits and Aussies losing their minds each and every time they hear the American pronunciation of “soldering”! 
(Upon which they then embark on an explanation of Americans “dropping” the L, giving an incorrect etymology, and often tacking on some rant about Americans “bastardizing” “their” language, when in actuality the British bastardized it more!)
The question is how did the L ended up in the word soldering in the first place, when the original French word souder lacks it?
(Let me preface this with a reminder that American English is my native language, and that I studied linguistics at university, and that my mother was a lifelong ESL teacher, so I have a
very strong background in English and its linguistics and history.)
I already explained this in reply #23:
Amazing how a whole country can be wrong.
Soldering is something you do with a soldering iron.
Soldering and brazing were in use 2500-3000 years ago. The Romans used lead/tin solder in plumbing.
The English *word* comes from Latin solidare or solidus which clearly have pronounced 'l's. The verb soldering is recorded by 1466 (Paston Letters ... Norfolk gentry), before the Americas were (re)discovered.
Just one small problem with your etymology: it is incorrect. English got the word not from Latin, but from French, by which point the L had already been dropped. Then, after the US colonies were established, English in the UK underwent a wave of “re-latinization”, during which the L was added back. And that change never propagated to the US.
[…]
There was a trend among some UK scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries to make English words look more like their presumed Latin (or Greek) origins. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform#16th_and_17th_centuriesCould it be the British added the L which was silent in some dialects and pronounced in others, only for the silent version to be adopted by the Americans?
I don’t
think so, but I’m not 100% sure.
Maybe it's because there were and still are more French speakers in America?
Unlikely. Those French speakers were, and are, geographically quite concentrated, and mainstream America didn’t really embrace French. (I mean… look at how awful most Americans’ pronunciation of French words are: they think every French word ends in the “wah” or “ey” sounds. In my observation, the British benefit from their proximity to France in terms of proper French pronunciation, while Americans benefit from their proximity to Mexico (and immigration from all of Latin America) in terms of proper pronunciation of Spanish words, something the British tend to be terrible at.)
It would certainly explain the silent H in herb and huge in most American English speakers.
While “herb” does indeed have a silent H in American English, I don’t know where you got the notion that “huge” has a silent H in standard/mainstream American English. It most certainly does not; the H is pronounced by nearly all speakers.
Your assumption about the British bastardising English more than the Americans is incorrect.
Sorry, my friend, but you’re absolutely incorrect. First of all, it’s untrue, and second, it’s not an “assumption” of mine, it is well-established fact among linguists who have studied the history of English (including British linguists of English). Here’s how Reply #23 continued:
[…]
It's not unusual for pronunciation to drift in isolated communities such as the USA.
As a general statement, that is true. However, in the specific case of English, it is actually British English that drifted far more. This is well established by historical linguists of English (for example, the British linguist David Crystal, who has written several definitive works on the history of English, published by Cambridge University Press.)
The best summary of the situation is this: since British English and American English “split”, both dialects have evolved away from the common ancestor, but British English evolved away more. So where the dialects differ, there is a greater chance that American English retains, or is closer to, the original form.
(I studied linguistics at university, so I have a deeper background in this than the average Joe.)
However, your observation about how early recordings sounded…
I suggest you watch some videos of 100 year old recordings on YouTube, of then American centenarians speaking English. You'll find that their accent, which is be over 180 years old now, since one's accent changes very little from their late-teens onwards, bares little resemblance to modern American English, often sounding more British.
…is correct.
But that’s because early recordings didn’t capture
mainstream speech. Recording was expensive, so there was huge selectivity in what and who got recorded, and it selected for the wealthy and powerful. And as it happens, the upper class of the northeastern US spoke a very different dialect, one which has largely died out since:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_elite_accent That very article’s lede includes the statement: “The late 19th century first produced audio recordings of and general commentary about such accents used by affluent East Coast and Northern Americans, particularly those in New York and New England.”
(And California was still unimportant at the time, so there was no equivalent Western elite accent. Elites would have used the Northeastern elite accent.’
So yes, the recordings sound more British, but that’s because they
weren’t recordings of standard American English.
See also the
Mid-Atlantic accent, the odd accent learned by actors and the like in the early 20th century (so called because of it being stuck somewhere in the middle of the ocean between USA and the UK, since it deliberately uses aspects of RP).
In reality both American and British English have diverged significantly.
Yes, and I said that back in Reply #23: both have diverged from our common ancestral form. But British English diverged
more on average.
I would expect the first English-American speakers would have sounded more like the British upper class accents back then, since it cost money to emigrate.
Ummm…
While it was the wealthy who organized and financed early colonization, they brought with them large numbers of laborers. And after that, the majority of emigrants were
not wealthy: there were various waves of laborers, farmers, indentured servants, and the deliberate export of the poor and of convicts.
So no, even from the very beginning, non-elite British English would have been dominant, as the elites were, numerically speaking, a tiny minority.
This is at odds with the idea British English is more posh, which has never, ever been the case, outside of the extreme upper class and privately educated. Unfortunately we can't go much further back than the 1840s.
Yep. For sure, Americans have a very rosy, romanticized view of British English, assigning to it high status, but also historical mythology, practically. (Hence every historical drama, historical reenactment, history documentary, etc. using posh British English.) In reality, the English spoken by the masses on both sides of the pond was never dominated by RP.
(What Americans don’t realize is that the British most definitely do not reciprocate the positive sentiment that Americans have towards the British and their English!)
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