really
what is no accent like?
i cant even imagine

i have but one question:
Am I smarter or are you dumber?

@FF ... Well here's a story that I was told that you might find interesting.

A story I have been told and which I am able to verify ... sort of ... is that a way of speaking English in Brooklyn also had an almost exact duplicate develop in New Orleans.

The way it was explained to me, this is the result of the same immigrant groups having settled both Cities at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. There were some five or six groups from Europe, I can't remember them all but mainly Irish, German, and Italian. Some kind of admixture from these languages created a local accent that included:

Swallowed T's in words like "bottle"
R's replacing "oi" sounds so that Greenpoint became "Greenpernt"
Th's replaced by D's, as in "dere," "dese" and "dose"

Anyway, I met someone from New Orleans who swears that it is true, that there are old time "native" New Orleanians who sound like old time Brooklynites. This person, though, only had a southern accent.

arcon, you may have no accent to you, but to anyone not from your local area you do

There is no language w/out an accent. BTW, there is an educational VHS cassette called "The History of English". Documentary, of course, but real interesting, especially having in mind the fact that English is not a pure language but a mixture of Germanic languages, French, Latin, and Nordic languages. BTW, is it true that Thursday is named after the Nordic god Thor (cf. Swedish Torsdag), and Friday - after Freia (cf. Swedish Fredag)? Just curious...

Just remember...if the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.

Hehe, my accent is kinda wierd, I sound like somewhere between a typical southerner and a Londoner (makes sense considering where I live). But if I'm shouting and I'm getting pissed off, a South African accent comes through!! It's bloody wierd, I guess I picked it up from my Dad who's a rather angry man most of the time, but its still srange the way these things happen!

@spectre good choice of film there my friend a true classic.

@ff & spectre - on the off-chance that you're not particularly interested in musicals, try the book that My Fair Lady was based on - Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. A wonderful piece of literature it is.

EDIT: if you're truly interested in this sort of stuff, look up "phonetics" in a search engine, but I warn you, this is a can of worms you may not wish to open - my uni dictation was in "phonetics and speech recognition", and you can end up exploring waveforms to the point where you go blind! You have been warned!

Grom.

Edited by - gromit on 03-11-2003 18:25:54

@gromit,

---

@ff & spectre - on the off-chance that you're not particularly interested in musicals, try the book that My Fair Lady was based on - Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. A wonderful piece of literature it is.

---

I'm not particularly interested in books.

But if I were, "wouldn't it be loverly?!"

Sir Spectre


... No more signature.

Edited by - Sir Spectre on 03-11-2003 18:47:24

in itself of course Pygmalion is based upon the Greek myth of Pygmalion & Galatea, from Ovid's Metamorphoses I believe (I might be wrong) although I find the musical a lot more fun!

Ya kno, I saw that sort of thing in my psich textbook recently, after seeing it here, and if we didn't read that way it would take hours to (for examlpe) read one of Spectre's plays

"Here I am, brain the size of the universe, trying to serve you a simple web page, and then it doesn't even exist! Where does that leave me?! I mean, I don't even know you." - TLR Web Server

@sir spectre LOL. We want none of your slum prudery here...

@Taw If I didn't know better, I'd have said you were actually a NASA supercomputer rtying to con us all with your AI.... How dooo you remember these things??!!

On a slightly different, but not altogether skewed, note, I took my parents to see "My Fair Lady" in the west end this summer. I'd highly recommend it to all. I was a bit put off by the fact that Russ Abbott was billed to play Alfred P. Doolittle, but I was actually pleasantly surprised by the man's talent....although it did take 15 minutes or so for me to stop imagining "blunderwoman" leaping onto the stage mid-performance

My accent is a weird mix of Scottish and english, mainly becaused i moved from my native homeland of Scotland when i was about 6. I've lived in England for 10 years and i still have a slight twinge of scottish left in my accent. I am also said to speak a lot slower now,the reason being my original dialect was glaswegan which is mainly fastly spoken and which most English ppl couldn't understand, so i had to learn to slow down my speech which i have done so that i could be understood.

"Make it so Number One"
Captain Picard 'Star Trek the Next Generation'

@grom, I just know stuff like that m8, its the result of going to a posh school!

actually I've been into Greek and Roman myth since I was about 5, and I've more than a passing interest in this language migration business, although for me its just one part of a greater cultural cross-pollination, if u will, that goes on all the time. In fact, we're doing it now!



Edited by - Tawakalna on 03-11-2003 21:10:57

@Zlo: ALL the days of the weeks, excluding Saturday, are named after German/Norse gods. Monday = moon day. Tue = Tyr, Wedne = Woden/Odin
Thursday and friday you explained already (thor and freya). Sunday is just sonne in German.

Saturday is weird, cuz it's from a Roman god, Saturn. Stupid romans.

WRT accents:
Chinese is also the same. In fact, Chinese as a language is a misnomer, because it is actually a collection of languages (commonly known as dialects, but the differences between one dialect and another are the same as the differences between German and Swedish) that derived from one language (just as Italian, Spanish and French derived from Latin) 1000-1500 years ago. The main dialect, Mandarin, is kinda like English in that it too is a mixture of various languages (some not native Han Chinese), such as Cantonese, Gui, Jin, and maybe some Mongolian. Because of this, like English, Mandarin also has regional accents existing alongside the native dialect(s) of the region. The Mandarin spoken in the area I was born (Changsha, Hunan Province) sounds different from the Mandarin spoken in Beijing/Northeast Provinces. Kinda like Brooklyn is different from California, which is different from South Africa. Same language, slightly different sounds.

My guess is that the dialects evolved in a similar pattern. One language -> many regional accents -> many regional dialects -> many regional languages. Chinese dialects, BTW, are mutually incomprehensible.

ver well put pieman! if i may just expand upon part of your post, the development of the Romance languages from Latin had already begun prior to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. contemporary writings by rhetoricians, poets and early christian church fathers etc. already bemoan the vulgarisation of Latin in the Western provinces, by the 3rd century BC a native of, say, Africa Proconsularis would have a dialect far removed from an Italian and even more incomprehensible to someone in Gaul or Britannia. it wasn't simply a matter of accent; words were being altered and their meanings changed by common use. naturally as long as the Empire lasted there was a standardising influence of Imperial patronage by the Army, the Civil Service, and the Senatorial class (and of course all educated people spoke Greek which had become the lingua franca throughout the West as well as being the native tongue of the Eastern Empire)

The 3rd century is particularly apt for such a change as this was a time of great regional disruption for the Empire as a whole and for a long periods the Western provinces were largely independent of Rome itself, under rebel emperors who could treat with "legitimate" emperors as equals. So a process of regional self-sufficiency is well under way with trade between regions being reduced, and as trade communications decay so do cultural and linguistic cross-fertilisations and so you get a parallel process of almost separate development. during periods of strong central Imperial authority this process gets partially arrested but the change has been made. by the 5th century regional dialects are so distinct and at such variance from Classical Latin that rich landowners, travelling around their estates in defiierent parts of the Empire, complain that they cannot make themselves understood anymore and have to employ translators.. within a commonwealth where officially everyone shares the same language! u get a similar complaint from churchmen of the time, St. Augustine for example bemoans the fact that he thinks no-one will understand him outside of his fellow citizens of Roman N.Africa.

by the time of the collapse of the Empire in the West the process is much accelerated and by the 6th century u have clearly distinct almost-languages in former provinces long cut off from the Imperial mainstream. of course the Empire survives in the East but its greek and Latin is preserved only as part of court ceremony and official documents. in a few generations u have recognisable French, italian, Spanish, Portuguese (and Romanian) BUT although they are quite distinct from Latin, they are far closer to it than the barbarian speech of their new masters whos linguistic influence is limted to say the least, comprising really only the odd word here and there.

interestingly by the 6th century, vulgarised latin on the mainland of western europe was so poor that celtic monks who had preserved the pronunciations and grammar of classical latin had to re-introduce it!

i suppose the point i'm making by this is that communications and economic links inevitably lead to new elements being introduced into language whether u like it or not, and the internet is such a rapid and powerful instrument of communication (amongst many others) that it's hardly surprising that my children speak americanisms and write like hackers, i even use SMS abbreviations myself cos I'm lazy!