Posted on 06/05/2013 3:10:55 PM PDT by SMGFan
Everyone knows that Americans don't exactly agree on pronunciations. Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect. Joshua Katz, a Ph. D student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualizations of Professor Bert Voux's linguistic survey that looked at how Americans pronounce words. (via) detsl on /r/Linguistics His results were first published on Abstract, the N.C. State research blog.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Well, we know that “coke” is correct.
:-)
see my 74 and 79...might interest you.
That is one thick accent. And it's not a commonly heard accent here in the US.
I think we generally believe that Brits either speak like Prince Charles, or have some Cockney chimney sweeper accent.
Boy was I mistaken.
I used to enjoy Andy Capp comics, and would ask my GF what he was saying in certain strips.
She told me, boop, you have to understand that Andy is from North England.
She knew that implicitly. I had no idea.
The word that chaps my hide is pecan. It’s puh-con, not pee-can. A pee can is an empty coffee can that you take with you on a long car ride.
__________
And which was used in the house at night when some folks I know had out-houses!
:-)
LOL
I have a friend in New Jersey, a longtime Freeper, who is Italian. One time she started talking about making gravy on Sunday. I asked her if she was having a pot roast. She said, “NO, you put gravy on pasta!” She meant sauce!
She is also the one who tells me she loves my accent (Virginian). I tell her she’s mistaken-—I have no accent, but she has a HUGE one.
Nerk is NJ's biggest city. Corey Booker is the mayor of Nerk.
Well, if all of ya’ll no-account carpetbaggin’ Yankees would learn howta speak, maybe we wouldn’t have half the problems we do!
_______
Now, be nice - they don’t know any better!
;-)
I'm wondering if the "soda" clusters in Milwaukee and St. Louis don't have something to do with "Big Beer" imposing its wishes on consumers.
When I first moved to New England the teacher was talking about whether we could bring "tonic" to the school outing. It scared me a little. I thought "What, we're taking patent medicine now?" but it was soda. That usage is dying out now.
Color me skeptical about some of the distinctions, though. "Carmel" and "Caramel" or "Maynaise" and "Mayonnaise" are the same thing -- until you want to play with somebody's head.
It’s true that regional accents have diminished somewhat, or have at least reduced themselves to the point where they are pretty much comprehensible by all speakers of that language in that country. I remember when the Brits had to subtitle programs from Yorkshire because nobody outside of that region could understand them!
I’m from the north but I live in the South now and I don’t have any trouble understanding anybody except the occasional elderly rural white speaker or some of the rural black dialect speakers (who are completely unintelligible to anybody outside of their group).
While the effect of TV has been not exactly standardization, at least it has meant the halting of the “drifting away” of a regional speech to a dialect and then to a whole new language.
There’s an intelligibility standard for the major languages and that’s actually a good thing. Languages, real or imagined or invented, become part of nationalist fantasies and they never have a positive effect on human life.
Don’t forget Bolivar, named after Simon.
It’s pronounced Bolliver.
And I bet you say “pin” and “pen” the same! When I went to CA from NY (where there’s a difference), I was completely mistified.
We, where I grew up in Chicago, always called them "gym shoes".
For instance, what did Ben Franklin sound like?
I can't recall what the final analysis was.
I wager that Ben had a "funny" accent to our ears, though.
And off topic, but I lived in Baltimore for years, and I still can't imitate that accent.
New Yawk, Boston, Dallas, Minnesota, easy to emulate.
Bal'mer?
Can't imitate, but I know it when I hear it.
In Colorado, near its headwaters, the Arkansas River is called the Ar-Kansas. In the state of Arkansas it’s pronounced Arkansaw.
I’ve always wondered if there’s a particular point on the river where the pronunciation by the locals changes.
Used to love it when my father’s family would come for a visit from the Philadelphia suburbs to our house in Bawl-T-More County. We kids used to giggle, too, when they spoke of drinking a cup of couwfee.
Bookmark for laughter !
I don't know how Morgan talks, but Martin Bashir doesn't sound very American. Indeed, he may sound more British now than he did in England.
But why do Australians speak with a British accent? Their immigration was a little later but not that much, and several generations have elapsed.
They may sound the same to you (and to most Americans), but Britons and Australians recognize that their accents are different. I suspect that we hear the similarities between the two accents but not the differences.
American regional accents are supposed to have similarities to British regional accents of the 17th and 18th century. Over time they've grown apart. Since British and Australian English started to diverge at a later period, it's likely that the similarities would be greater.
Don't ever tell Australians and New Zealanders that they sound alike, though.
When I was in Australia I had trouble understanding some of the locals. I had to listen real hard. Now those on television spoke pretty much like I would expect living in Southern California.
One of the hardest times I had understanding “English” was when I was in Hong Kong in the late 60’s. The spoke with and “English” accent with a “Chinese” accent thrown in for good measure. Say what? Hahaha.
Here in SoCal I use a lot of those terms back and forth such as pee-khan and pee-can. Same with soda, pop, Coke or soda-pop. Same with some of the others. I guess it is just how I feel that day.
bfl
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