Languages, accents, dialects an' t'ing

[mjmooney]

22 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I like the BBC trend of pronouncing place names and some people’s names in a weird localised accent.

There’s one guy, one of their Asian Geographical reporters that says pretty much everything in no discernible accent, until he says the word Taliban. The word Taliban, he pronounces like a 1970’s pub comedian doing a Pakistani accent.

He's not the only one. Aasmah Mir (does R4's Saturday Live) - Pakistani parents, but a Glasgow-born Celtic fan, speaks with a faintly Scots middle-class accent, until she gets to any word emanating from the subcontinent, and she goes full-on, just for that one word (Urdu becomes Urrhhdhhdhuw, etc.) As you say, it just sounds odd. 

[MakemineVanilla]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

FTFY

Is it true you are often mistaken for Brian Sewell??

[il_serpente]

9 hours ago, mjmooney said:

I notice the current (UK) TV ads for IKEA are using a vaguely Swedish-accented voiceover with the 'ick-ey-ah' pronunciation. It's not working. I've still never heard any British person use it, everyone is stubbornly sticking to 'eye-kee-ah'. We seem to want to always pronounce an initial 'I' as 'eye' - hence 'eye-beetha' for 'Ibiza', and my particular bête noir, 'eye-dillick' for 'idyllic'. 

And there's no shaking the 'Van Gogh' problem. I assume it should end with the 'throat clearing sound' - but most anglophone speakers can't or won't do it. So in the US it's simply ignored - 'Van Go', and in the UK it's invariably 'Van Goff'  - I suspect due to its apparent similarity to the English surname 'Gough' (goff). 

My father (Norwegian) used to joke that Dutch is not so much a language as a disease of the throat.

[il_serpente]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I like the BBC trend of pronouncing place names and some people’s names in a weird localised accent.

There’s one guy, one of their Asian Geographical reporters that says pretty much everything in no discernible accent, until he says the word Taliban. The word Taliban, he pronounces like a 1970’s pub comedian doing a Pakistani accent.

 

Back in the '80s when I was involved in groups opposing US policy in Central America, it used to amuse me when white, middle-class suburbanites would be speaking generic American English and then use exaggerated attempts at native pronunciations of country names.   Nee-carrrr-ag-wah.

In California, I run into plenty of bi-lingual Hispanics with no discernible accent who will do similar when saying Spanish words or names, but they generally learned to pronounce them that way as kids.   The transition still sounds a little funny, but there's nothing pretentious about it.

[sidcow]

Isn't it only right to try and correctly pronounce place-names as they should sound? I say that as a citizen of a nation with a proud history of informing people how their place-names should sound, indeed telling them what their new place-names now are in many cases

 

[il_serpente]

24 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Isn't it only right to try and correctly pronounce place-names as they should sound? I say that as a citizen of a nation with a proud history of informing people how their place-names should sound, indeed telling them what their new place-names now are in many cases

 

Yes, but no need to go overboard with exaggerated emphasis on the sounds that are different from how they'd be pronounced in English.  It always came across to me as an attempt to prove how much they were in solidarity with the people our government was helping oppress.

After all, the same people don't pronounce Spanish place names in California the same way, and  we don't say Moskva, København, Firenze, Østereich, etc.

[MakemineVanilla]

46 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Isn't it only right to try and correctly pronounce place-names as they should sound? I say that as a citizen of a nation with a proud history of informing people how their place-names should sound, indeed telling them what their new place-names now are in many cases

 

When I lived in Germany the locals used to get really huffy about how the English gave German cities English names - Cologne etc.

[bickster]

20 minutes ago, MakemineVanilla said:

When I lived in Germany the locals used to get really huffy about how the English gave German cities English names - Cologne etc.

So how are we supposed to pronounce Mount Wank, Rimsting, Titz, Weener, Wankum, Wangerland and Fahrtgasse?

[blandy]

10 hours ago, bickster said:

So how are we supposed to pronounce Mount Wank, Rimsting, Titz, Weener, Wankum, Wangerland and Fahrtgasse?

They need to be renamed, like Austria did here

Quote

Fugging, formerly called **** (German: [ˈfʊkɪŋ](listen); officially renamed in 2021), is an Austrian village in the municipality of Tarsdorf, located in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria. The village is 33 km (21 mi) north of Salzburg and 4 km (2.5 mi) east of the Inn river, which forms part of the German border.

The village is especially popular with British tourists; as a local tour guide explained: "The Germans all want to see Mozart's house in Salzburg; the Americans want to see where The Sound of Music was filmed; the Japanese want Hitler's birthplace in Braunau; but for the British, it's all about ****

 

[maqroll]

I'm noticing Brits are increasingly using the term "bro", and I find it really funny  

[Seat68]

10 minutes ago, maqroll said:

I'm noticing Brits are increasingly using the term "bro", and I find it really funny  

Hell of a lot of bruvs amongst the young set. 

[mjmooney]

17 minutes ago, maqroll said:

I'm noticing Brits are increasingly using the term "bro", and I find it really funny  

I think you should start a counter-campaign to get Americans using "old chap". 

[bielesibub]

8 minutes ago, Seat68 said:

Hell of a lot of bruvs amongst the young set. 

its all about the 'ting

[AlwaysAVFC]

I've given my wife a bit of insecurity about her accent. She's from Wiltshire and we moved to West Mids about 2 years ago. She's actually not got that much of a West Country accent but every time she says Raspberry I can't help but rip the pass. She wanted a raspberry drink yesterday but didn't  order it she was paranoid of how she sounds, Oops.

[maqroll]

NPR just hired a new daytime host who is an Australian native. Her accent is fairly typical, non-rhotic. "Mahkit" (market), etc.

So NPR allows for that accent, but they would never hire a Bostonian with a pronounced accent who would also say "mahkit". 

I honestly wonder why.

[mjmooney]

9 hours ago, maqroll said:

NPR just hired a new daytime host who is an Australian native. Her accent is fairly typical, non-rhotic. "Mahkit" (market), etc.

So NPR allows for that accent, but they would never hire a Bostonian with a pronounced accent who would also say "mahkit". 

I honestly wonder why.

I find it difficult to imagine it being pronounced any other way, tbh. 

And if those pronounced 'R's are so important, why do you guys turn the two-syllable 'mirror' into 'meer'? 

[Vive_La_Villa]

On 02/05/2022 at 16:03, mjmooney said:

He's not the only one. Aasmah Mir (does R4's Saturday Live) - Pakistani parents, but a Glasgow-born Celtic fan, speaks with a faintly Scots middle-class accent, until she gets to any word emanating from the subcontinent, and she goes full-on, just for that one word (Urdu becomes Urrhhdhhdhuw, etc.) As you say, it just sounds odd. 

I pronounced Samosah in the correct accent once and got a lot of blank faces.  

[AVFC_Hitz]

1 minute ago, Vive_La_Villa said:

I pronounced Samosah in the correct accent once and got a lot of blank faces.  

Were you trying to curry favour with those around you?

[maqroll]

2 hours ago, mjmooney said:

I find it difficult to imagine it being pronounced any other way, tbh. 

And if those pronounced 'R's are so important, why do you guys turn the two-syllable 'mirror' into 'meer'? 

There's a BBC news announcer with a strong West Country accent who pronounces her Rs pretty aggressively, and it's always a bit jarring because you just don't expect to hear that. 

[mjmooney]

1 hour ago, maqroll said:

There's a BBC news announcer with a strong West Country accent who pronounces her Rs pretty aggressively, and it's always a bit jarring because you just don't expect to hear that. 

The most common theory on the origin of American accents is that they derive from a mix of Irish and Devon/Cornwall. Makes sense to me.