SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
British actors certainly seem able to play American more easily than vice versa, I suppose it's easier to remove some of the expressiveness from your voice than to add more.
The English Language In Translation
- Thread starter Pinkie_Flamingo
- Start date
British actors certainly seem able to play American more easily than vice versa, I suppose it's easier to remove some of the expressiveness from your voice than to add more.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
wrong thread
Mrs Miggins
There's been a slight cheese accident
Why do we have such an enormous range of accents in such a small space in the UK? My Kiwi partner is fascinated by this and we watch progs like UK First Dates with great amusement.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Shetland has the most recent Nordic influence of anywhere in the British isles, which is bound to have affected accents. It's also an isolated and not very populous part of the world.
Evolution of language follows similar patterns to biological evolution, where changes are more rapid in larger, more diverse and better-connected groups. It's therefore possible that somewhere like New Zealand provides a snapshot of what British English might have sounded like a hundred and fifty years ago, as the language of the relatively small and isolated population of British settlers who ended up there may have changed less than dialects in the UK in the same period of time. If we follow the evolution analogy though, there is a counterbalancing effect in that with a small population the effect of any chance divergence from the average value of whatever you're measuring will be proportionately greater.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
We are a mongrel nation of settlers, invaders, refugees and tourists who forgot to go home again from all over Europe and beyond. Still there are things nobody has an explanation for, like the frictive phoneme found in Scouse accents (replacing the hard k in 'book' etc) but nowhere else in England.
Mrs Miggins
There's been a slight cheese accident
It would certainly be interesting to hear what someone who knows about these things has to say about the Kiwi accent and Victorian Scottish as a lot of Scots came here. They roll their r's in the South where many of them settled.
Mrs Miggins
There's been a slight cheese accident
Scouse always sounds like a very isolated accent to me so that's interesting to hear.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
Well, sort of. But it is not the sweetest of that accent. The two main characters sound more Arkansas than Alabama to my ear.
GREAT tv series though. Holy Toledo.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
O easily -- but McConaughey is not authentic sounding as a Southern man. Warm nights, cold beer, sexy man opens his mouth and says the most mundane things in the right, silvery way.....O, I have some lovely memories, LOLOL.
I was privileged to live in the Deep South for a couple of decades. Ahh........
19force8
For the avoidance of faith
At least we had shoes
We moved to Derby when I was a kid. After a couple of days my sister (four at the time) was in tears because people thought she was a duck.
The accent of Ilkeston (half way to Nottingham) was impenetrable when I first visited the town as a teenager.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
It's pronounced 'Ilston' if you actually live there.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
Actually, we have such variation in our dialects that I can put a person in the right neighborhood, in the right city, by ear. We also have a few non-English speaking isolated groups of people who have 200 or 300 years of variation on Portugese or French or many other languages, including vocabulary not spoken by their fellow mother tongue types.
But the impact of tv on us all has been to flatten out those difference. Plus, people do not live in the same neighborhoods, birth to death, they way they tended to do when I was a little girl.
And naturally, the tv and movies gloss over these differences. If you have seen the movie "Four Brothers", Marc Walhburg (who actually has a Southie Irish Catholic Boston accent, as does Sean Penn IRL) sounds fairly authentic as a Detroit white kid, south of 8 mile.
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Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
On the Rust Belt's (Great Lakes region) variety of accents:
The Origins and Evolution of the Cleveland Accent (Yes, You Have an Accent, Cleveland)
Err, no love. Why don't your Scottish grandparents sound like the characters on Shetland.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
I haven't been able to trace them back any further than the port they departed from, Glasgow. They were very rural, wherever they grew up, I do know that much. But my geneological mojo isn't strong enough to go past 1929.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Here's a map of the most common languages besides English and Spanish by US state:
Interesting to see Polish in the mix there. Polish is now England's second most spoken language, having recently overtaken Punjabi.
Interesting to see Polish in the mix there. Polish is now England's second most spoken language, having recently overtaken Punjabi.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
Interestingly, the Europeans who settled the Deep South were overwhelmingly Scottish (Protestant) and Irish (Protestant), so they are the antecedents of the gorgeous Savannah drawl. How that happened, I have no idea, but it did and in less than 300 years.
"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" has some fairly authentic accents spoken. Great film, too.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
Here's a map of the most common languages besides English and Spanish by US state:
Interesting to see Polish in the mix there. Polish is now England's second most spoken language, having recently overtaken Punjabi.
Look at Texas; that enclave of Vietnamese speakers are the South Vietnamese who fled to the US at the fall of Saigon, in 1975, and their children. They're a fascinating group in every way.
Pinkie_Flamingo
American & Annoyed
Well, nor do they sound like the people on "Rebus" or any other tv series set in Scotland I have watched. Literally, I am not sure they spoke English at all, except as a kinda of "pidgeon" version.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
Been reading up on the history of California's Chinese lately. They weren't half treated like shit back in the day
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
They probably spoke Scots, which isn't English although it's closely related. Since you don't know what region they are from, we don't know what dialect of Scots they spoke, but at the time you're referring to it wouldn't have been much influenced by English (now we have TV and radio in our houses all the time. Back then, much less so).
I'm Scottish, but I don't speak Scots: I speak English with a Scottish accent and few Scots words and syntax idioms. This is because of where I grew up (a post Gaelic speaking area of the Highlands). But if you're grandparents were from, say, Ayrshire or Aberdeenshire, they'd have spoken a very local dialect of Scots with a huge number of words that aren't in English and with non English grammar and syntax rules.
(Scots didn't have a standard literary form after the Union of Crowns, and so the local dialects varied greatly from each other in vocabulary without having a "standard dialect" like English English does. Although Burns did have roots both in Ayrshire and the Mearns, where his paternal ancestors farmed. So his Scots was wider than just local to Ayrshire. In the 20th Century, Hugh MacDiarmid tried to create a standardised version of Scots, which he called Lallans. It's sometimes pejoratively referred to as Synthetic Scots. It didn't really take off, except as a written form, but was more heavily based on the Borders dialect than he realised).
If you're interested in dialect and language the two books I'd recommend are:
A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English by Anthony Burgess.
Language Change: progress or decay? By Jean Aitchison.
Mrs Miggins
There's been a slight cheese accident
Well how very interesting. I didn't know any of that. Thank you danny la rouge
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
I can't believe I wrote you're instead of your. I never do that. I can only assume my stupid phone made assumptions.
Im going to do a research study on how "smart" phones are making us worse at language.
Im going to do a research study on how "smart" phones are making us worse at language.
Leo2
Vexatious correspondent
I'm totally gobsmacked by this post - is it some form of humour with which I am unfamiliar?
You use 'you're' twice in the above post (to which I presume you are referring,) and in both instances it was totally correct. You could not possibly have used 'your' in this phrase - "but at the time you're referring to ..." nor in this - "If you're interested in dialect ..." So at what are you expressing disbelief?
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
"if you're grandparents".I'm totally gobsmacked by this post - is it some form of humour with which I am unfamiliar?
You use 'you're' twice in the above post (to which I presume you are referring,) and in both instances it was totally correct. You could not possibly have used 'your' in this phrase - "but at the time you're referring to ..." nor in this - "If you're interested in dialect ..." So at what are you expressing disbelief?
What I should have done is gone back and corrected it and kept my gob shut.
Leo2
Vexatious correspondent
I disagree, you showed yourself to be the better, more honest, person by commenting upon it.
Mrs Miggins
There's been a slight cheese accident
I never got fully used to it in two years of living there, and I was in my thirties.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
There's not a single person in this country under the age of 25 who can spell, and that's a scientific fact.
Leo2
Vexatious correspondent
Umm ... dunno about scientific fact ... I'm 20. If you can't spell at my age, you never will.
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