Reddit mentions of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

You state: "Anyway we are a mainly English-heritage family living in New Zealand now for around six generations, ancestors largely from Cornwall if I recall but some irish and scottish mixed in too along the line somewhere."

That statement jogged my memory about a statement made by Sir Winston Churchill in his great tome "The history of the English Speaking People". ........
He wrote about the successive invasions of Britain by other peoples and that eventually the last area where one could find people of ancient Briton heritage was the extreme southwest area of the island..........which would be Cornwall!\

Here is a good explanation of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Britons

Here is a good read on how the English language developed and the author's opinions of how it was influenced by the Celts.
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001JOHCHU/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title

It gets a bit "sloggy" in places but will all of the sudden hit you with great well reasoned statements on a frequent basis. It is well worth the read.

Perhaps your family has a tradition handed down from their Cornish ancestors regarding the Celts.

> You've noted in from Singapore, so let me tell you about how stupid the origins of local dialect can be. Someone mispronounced a word. People start mispronouncing it on purpose to be funny. Then people do it to sound cool. And now I see people unironically saying "England" instead of "English"

This is exactly the way that shorted names like Bill, Bob, and Dick became commonplace in English. At the time I'm sure it was considered extremely distasteful, but now it is totally pedestrian.

>I understand the evolution of language. But like I said from the start, not all change is positive. Even if your "ve" sounds like "of", it's still bad grammar to write it out as of.

I get your beef - you don't want the language to split in a million different directions, but really, really, this has happened to all languages but especially English many times over in history. There is a book by John McWhorter called Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue that highlights the way that Germanic, Celtic, and Romantic languages fomented on the British Isles for 2000 years to produce our modern English.

It just happens. You're yelling at the clouds to insist that people pronounce English in a particular (right) way. It isn't going to happen, and I'm not even sure it is something we want to happen.

For more in this vein: http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History-ebook/dp/B001JOHCHU