Posted on 10/09/2010 8:08:47 AM PDT by prisoner6
I was born in Texas, but we left when I was a baby. After that, I never ventured below the Mason/Dixon line.
When we moved to Georgia in the mid-90’s, I was horrified to find that I couldn’t understand *anybody*. For the first two weeks, my mom took on the role of translator as I tried to get our electricity turned on, phone hooked up, garbage collected, etc.
It only took me a couple of months to get the hang of it, now I can barely hear a difference. Weirdly, I occasionally slip and let loose a Southern accent myself. Without even realizing it, I was involved with “language immersion”.
“But then, if you had gotten the point, you wouldn’t have changed into Captain Spellcheck...would you?”
Touchy, touchy, your humor meter is not turned on this morning, is it. Are you suffering from the Obama thin-skinned syndrome?
I pronounce it in the good ole American way - Julius Caesar. Not with a hard C. But like most Americans I tend to pronounce foreign words as they are said in the language of origin, although I tend not to use Latin pronunciation.
My favorite Brit-speak: the Italian film director Pasolini (Pass-O-Lini) is pronounced Pass-AHL-oni in Great Britain. Truly dreadful.
But think of all the translator’s jobs that would be lost!
Ebonics translators or, something this classic “accent” translator from “Bananas”
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF-AcR14Km8
The problem in all “proper” English definitions is the “useage” in dictionaries. It’s like people using the word
“floundering” when they mean “foundering” Because it’s used it’s there- due to social purists in the dictionary world. Doesn’t mean it’s very intelligent per se, just commonly used. Ebonics unfortunately could become “useage”
and trash talk accepted. I regard all of this like entering a foreign country.
That's exactly the way I describe South African English.....very tough to understand.
Largely the result of mass media. There are still certainly pockets with deeply rooted accents, but we all watch the same TV shows.
American actors now do brilliant British accents; just check out all the David Hare plays that come to B’way with American actors playing Brits. The training for accents in both the USA and Great Britain has improved drastically over the last few decades. We’ve come a long way, baby since the days of Dick Van Dyke (Mary Poppins) and Laurence Olivier’s awful American accents!
Unfortunately, in my past actor days I was truly terrible at accents. No ear.
Ahhsss hooole! BBC twitlet personage
Maggie Gyllenhaal in "Nannie McPhee Returns" did fairly well.
That’s because it’s Dutch Boer accented English. Like listening to German expats who haven’t spoken German in a while, speak English.
The article makes the mistake of assuming there was/is a single British accent and a single American accent.
The pirate accent (heavy on the “r”) is alive and well in the small towns of Devon and Cornwall, UK. (Well, 20 years ago it was).
Hear various English accents recorded from the 1950’s through the ‘70s:
http://sounds.bl.uk/Browse.aspx?category=Accents-and-dialects&collection=Survey-of-English-dialects
I once heard a radio interview with the British actor Patrick Stewart. They asked him something about his younger days and he said, "Ah, yes, I was an assle then."
I once heard a radio interview with the British actor Patrick Stewart. They asked him something about his younger days and he said, "Ah, yes, I was an assle then."
Beat me to it.
I have no clue what the author means by an American accent. Cross state lines, or for that matter from inner city to suburbs, and you're listening to a different accent.
If you don’t pronounce it ‘Yoolius Kayser’ you are guilty of perpetuating one of those English mispronunciations you are railing against.
The only way I can think of that this mispronounciation could have come about is if some English person who had never heard Latin being spoken just read the name as he thought it looked and passed this error on to others. The change in pronounciation could only have come about as a result of confusing the hard and the soft uses of the written letters ‘j’ and ‘c’...
And BBC types and humorists like to make fun of internal regional accents as well, as in this bit of fun from the old
UK TV’s the Fast Show-—”We’re Cockneys!”
Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BV8KfpE3BA
LOL!
The United States of America, and the United Kingdom, two nations separated by a common language.
Where opportunities for confusion abound.
The reference in the article about the upper classes adopting the non-rhotic speech makes me think of NPR. Why do they use so many people with “British” accents? Do they think it lends credence to their propaganda?
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