Posted on 10/03/2012 10:21:04 AM PDT by FeliciaCat
Don’t forget “smarmy, toffee-nosed, malodorous pervert.”
The dude abides.
Back in I think the late 60’s in a history/culture class, our teacher said our area of the country around the Grate Lakes was the only area considered not to have a unique accent/dialect. I was secretly thinking, “what about California?” When I lived and waitressed in New Jersey they used to mock my accent, like theirs was so much better, lol. Funny how life will teach one how much they learned in school was pretty much garbage. Three hours away from me was the land of Pittsburghese. Yeah, right, I had no accent. I’m married to a native Californian now. He definitely doesn’t have an accent.
I once saw a reenactor portraying George Washington who was speaking with what was essentially an English accent, because he believed that's how Washington spoke, However, an article published in the magazine Southern Partisan a few years ago argued that the Southern accent was up and running in the 1700's, and that Washington spoke with a drawl, y'all.
Eventually some form of Tagalog will take over the world. Unless we actually manage to get off planet, then we’ll start dialecting again.
I too have read, maybe here on FR that Southern U.S. English is closer to what was spoken in say, the 1700s than modern Englishmen speak.
Of course there are many variations in different parts of the South. I recall a girl from Chester, South Carolina whose drawl was so thick I had real trouble understanding her. It didn’t matter because she was so pretty that I could have just stood there watching her and been happy.
The Biblically-influenced speech — complete with “thee” and “thou”
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LOL! Bible influenced eh?
right...because “Thee” and “Thou” was invented just for the bible.
Pinhead.
...like the compulsion to post derogatory insults about a subject you ostensibly care nothing about, driven by the despisement of those who do care?
But...I came here for an argument!
People sounded educated back then. The “class disparity” wasn’t between those who had money and those who didn’t, but between those who were educated and those who were not. There was always a vast difference between the poor shop girl who spoke perfect English and the rich wife of a mobster who spoke using poor grammar and slang.
Yeah, I'm sure it's something like that.
Fortunately there are those in Great Britain who are doing all that they can to preserve the “Northerners” including various Scottish peoples.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK_KhzQEjoQ
The Lake Michigan corridor is dominated by the very distinct Chicago accent (Where "z" sounds become "s" sounds at the end of nouns, and udder tings like dat, yuh know) once the flat Indiana twang has given way somewhere around Michigan City.
Further north and west around Huron/Superior (Wisconsin and Minnesota), the old Scandanavian inflections take hold as speakers develop a higher, more nasal register and a slight lilting cadence: "Whatever ya do, don' eat da lukefisk. It'll kill ya, quick, you betcha."
But...I came here for an argument!
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And you found it. See ignorant posts herein by circlecity.
Californians speak with an accent, which is probably influenced by immigrants from the Midwest and South. Here is a list of words and how they are pronounced in California:
I’m trying to come to grips with a middleground here. On one hand, I’m fascinated by obscure, obsolete, and defunct languages (Easter Island’s written content is amazing and completely opaque). On the other hand, “supply and demand” has a natural purpose extending to linguistics: if a language/dialect does not facilitate its host speakers enough, it will fade, displaced by more successful linguistics. I hate to say “good riddance”, but at the same time we as a species can’t function well in an instant-worldwide-communication manner (FR a prime example) with tens of thousands of languages competing without many/most falling away. Just something I don’t see much academic consideration of (short of that guy’s outright insults).
“But we now have ebonics, Cajun, Boston, and like totally valley girl.”
Veni, Vidi, Vali:
“I came, I saw, and like, Oh my God!”
As a black friend of mine said of Ebonics being its own language, "I've never met a black person who couldn't understand the TV."
No it isn’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.
circlecity: “No it isn’t.”
</reference MontyPython>
I just did. Your idea of a response is simply to dismiss what you can’t answer.
I think it’s Socrates who’s credited with the saying (a platitude to you) that the unconsidered life’s not worth living. Loss of language makes that consideration more difficult, or even impossible. That has a great bearing on my day to day existence. Maybe not so much for you. As I said (and Socrates would agree), that makes you pitiful and contemptible.
The only reason the Great Lakes are considered to have no accent is because that’s the accent radio and then TV decided to use, so it became the “generic American” accent, aka “no accent”. Everywhere has an accent, the only question is how much does it vary from “generic national”, which is still an accent even though we pretend it isn’t.
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