Useless Grammer Thread

[Aussie_Don]

I have noticed that foreign actors affecting an American accent for a role usually come close but not quite right. For example, Hugh Laurie on "House" (he plays an American doctor) over emphasises certain inflections. His "Rs" are highly rhotic, almost distracting. Occasionally he slips back into his native accent, too.

The various accents from the American South seem to be particularly difficult to master.

I've noticed this on lots of British shows.

American actors often seem to struggle with regional accents, too.

All true -- what I was saying is that most people from the US understand the various regional accents, even if they cannot speak in those accents.

And you're absolutely right about non-native speakers of US English seldom getting the accent right. In various theatre productions that I've seen here in Melbourne, I can only point to a few times when I thought that the actor(s) "got it right".

After nearly 32 years here, the natives still say I've got a US accent, though any time that I've been in the US recently everyone there has told me that I have an Aussie accent.

-Don

[S Mitchell]

Interesting thread.....

When I moved here to Australia in '82 (Long story - ex-wife was an "exchange teacher", so I guess it makes me a souvenir ) She used to complain about me turning up the volume on the TV when Australian programs were being watched. This lasted until one evening "Cool Hand Luke" was broadcast. While I'm from PA and not the South, as with most from the USA, I don't have much trouble with the other regional accents. She turned the volume up and finally realised what I'd been saying all along. With an unfamiliar accent the listener needs a bit more volume to get enough redundancy to correctly decipher the words.

-Don

I'm that way with all but the most slow and precise UK accents. I find I have to be able to see the speakers' mouths (or turn up the volume) to understand them. I also sometimes had a hard time making myself understood, with my midwestern US accent, when I was stationed in Great Britain.

But it can be an issue even within US regions. When I was stationed in Texas, I had an Air Force buddy from Philadelphia who was mystified by the local dialect!

[James Hood]

Given the USA has 4 or so times the number of people of England, Australia and NZ combined and has about the same land mass, 'not too surprising to this mind, the vast number of and variations in dialects, here.

As several other X-Markers, 'personally find the myriad variations in "spoken-in-writing accents" thoroughly delightful on this forum.

Regarding a comment about one speaker's spoken word sounding strange to another...

...picture Star Trek's Mr. Spock being encountered and addressed by a stereotypic Texas cowboy. "Y'all ain't from 'round these here parts, are y'?"

[OC Richard]

I see phrases here all the time that sound odd to me, though they are not necessarily incorrect. It's actually very interesting to see the regional differences in our common language, and I enjoy the exposure to it.

One silly example is that I've always heard the phrase "to each his own", but many here from the UK tend to express it as "each to his own".

Or 'horses for courses' which I've only heard Brits say.

This stuff is very interesting to me, especially since I work at Disneyland and talk to people from all over the world every day. No, really. Ever talk to somebody from Vanuatu?

There's a great YouTube 'thread' I suppose one could call it called 'accent tag' and it's extremely interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=accent+tag

Also interesting are various videos of people in the UK, Ireland, Australia, etc doing very bad American accents. They often have the idea that the USA has only two accents which they call "Texas" and "California" (being a Deep South accent and the stereotypical "Valley Girl" accent respectively). On Accent Tag you can hear actual speakers from all over the USA which gives a quite different impression.

Now that's all accent stuff. About grammar, the main thing I hear, and which millions of Americans have been exposed to due to the popularity of the Harry Potter series, is what is called verb phrase ellipsis.

Here we either say the full verb phrase, or make it short; English people often cut it off in between the American extremes as in:

"Oh, you shouldn't have done that!" (USA)
"Oh, you shouldn't have done!" (England)
"Oh, you shouldn't have!" (USA)

Then there's shall and will, with will, already universal in the USA, slowly taking over from shall in England.

There's an English newspaper headline, quoting a certain politician, where some papers have the quote "I shall do it" and others have the quote "I will do it", quoting the same statement, published the same day, all in London papers.

[piperdbh]

I've been told that every sound in every language of the world can be written using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), except for one: the southeastern US "i", as in "I don't know why folks like to hear me say why, cry, sigh and high." In case you've never met me, watch a few minutes of "The Andy Griffith Show" and you'll hear this vowel performed perfectly. There's no diphthong in it at all. Also, for me and most of the folks I know, "ant", "aunt", and "can't" all rhyme with "paint".

[ctbuchanan]

I'm often told that being from Connecticut I have no accent. Which is probably true. It is also somewhat odd as just a few miles to the east of us there is the Rhode Island, Boston accent which famously drops all 'r's. And just to the west we have the New York/Brookly/Bronx accents.

[fluter]

I've been told that every sound in every language of the world can be written using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), except for one: the southeastern US "i", as in "I don't know why folks like to hear me say why, cry, sigh and high." In case you've never met me, watch a few minutes of "The Andy Griffith Show" and you'll hear this vowel performed perfectly. There's no diphthong in it at all.

it's not only that there's no diphthong, but most other US denizens can't even find the preceding vowel sound. The standard English long I is rendered [aɪ] (roughly "ah" + "ee"), and the Southern version is sometimes rendered [a:] a sort of prolonged "ah". That may serve farther west, but my own Carolina "I" is a more open vowel, much like that of piperdbh or, indeed, Andy Griffith.

Hours of innocent merriment have been derived from having midwesterners attempt to say that vowel as I do. I suspect that their ears have simply never been tuned to that particular waveform.

I do, however, refer to Frances Bavier's character as "Ant Bee" rather than "Aint Bee" or "Awhnt Bee."

[OC Richard]

I've been told that every sound in every language of the world can be written using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), except for one...

We have to keep in mind what the IPA (or any writing system) is, and what it isn't.

As one site puts it:

The permanent, intrinsic problem with the IPA is that real sounds are infinitely variable. Sound spectrograms show that a single sound varies slightly each time it is pronounced. Thus, the IPA could only capture a part of each individuals unique accent, or way of speaking (called an idiolect).

The differences here, of course, are not meaningful. But when comparing sounds across languages, the minute differences become more important. What seems to be the same sound in different languages may actually vary in minute degrees. (cf. the degrees of aspiration in the sound "t" in English, German, Georgian, Mongolian; or the degree or type of glottalization in the sound "t" in Georgian, Navajo or even in English hatbox.. Even [m] differs in English and Russian in slight ways that the IPA does not distinguish. Thus, the IPA would not be able to transcribe all the phonetic detail of, say, a Russian accent in English.

The IPA ignores minute differences between sounds if those differences never contrast with one another in any single language. The IPA symbols, therefore, are generalizations. The sounds of speech, however, are more complicated.

In a larger sense, no writing system can fully capture the sounds of any language, nor in fact capture any sound whatsoever, because a writing system is a series of silent marks. The sound comes from the person reading the marks, and no two people reading a particular mark will pronounce precisely the same sound.

This site is fun for studying USA dialect stuff...

http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/SurveyMaps/