I think I have an lj problem; if nobody I know is updating, I start wondering through those of people I've only spoken to once or twice.
My talk was amazing! Alas, I had to cut it down, so I didn't get to play most of my audioclips, but the tutor apparantly said in a cafe at lunchtime that I'd been excellent.
Yes, 'RP' is more or less correct (though the BBC are trying to shake that reputation recently- well, there are noticably Scottish announcers and a definatly Welsh newsreader, though they all still have thier regional slant on RP). What it isn't, is the Queen's English- the Queen speaks an English that's more or less unique to her (what's even sillier is that that expersion seems to have been coined in the Victorian age, and Victoria's mother tongue was German, and she never completely lost the accent). What's really irritating, well, apart from getting told 'Well, all British accents sound posh and educated to me,', is when forign networks make mistakes when somebody really should have put them right; for example, in Frasier, when Daphne and her brother had accents from different ends of England, because some producer seemed to have the idea that all working-class English people are Cockneys.
When it comes to a true picture of the chippy culture battle between the different regions of England, I truly reccomend Stuart Macconie's Pies and Prejudice. All English people know that the north of England is a very different place to the south- it's just something never talked about to forigners.
I'm not really suprised about the Carolina thing- I mean, in Herriot's Yorkshire, they still had the two forms of you after about 50 years of near-universal literacy, reasonable roads and radio broadcasts (in fact, we had a Yorkshire girl in our class in the late nineties who still used 'thou' and '-sen' for '-self', all those Herriot things. And they say that some features of American speech are closer to 15th-16th century English than the English of 21st century England anyway (though I doubt that it's an exact match- and anyway, factors like the elongated 'a'- as in 'bath' having the long a of 'car' instead of the short 'a' of 'apple', which are a late 18th century development in England (yes, even the Swanns and Navy officers shouldn't actually be using them, but that would totally confuse the average audience member) are, as you know, only actually a feature of south-easten English anyway (well, they are in West Country (ie Barbossa-speak), but they've always been there, and prior to about 1780 were actually considered rustic and not classy in the slightest).
(Best bit? The expression 'arr'- despite what T'n'T seem to think- is not a meaningless piraty ejaculation, but West Country dialect for 'yes'. Probably associated with scurvy dogs because the West Country was a convieniant place for smuggling, wrecking etc..)
no subject
My talk was amazing! Alas, I had to cut it down, so I didn't get to play most of my audioclips, but the tutor apparantly said in a cafe at lunchtime that I'd been excellent.
Yes, 'RP' is more or less correct (though the BBC are trying to shake that reputation recently- well, there are noticably Scottish announcers and a definatly Welsh newsreader, though they all still have thier regional slant on RP). What it isn't, is the Queen's English- the Queen speaks an English that's more or less unique to her (what's even sillier is that that expersion seems to have been coined in the Victorian age, and Victoria's mother tongue was German, and she never completely lost the accent). What's really irritating, well, apart from getting told 'Well, all British accents sound posh and educated to me,', is when forign networks make mistakes when somebody really should have put them right; for example, in Frasier, when Daphne and her brother had accents from different ends of England, because some producer seemed to have the idea that all working-class English people are Cockneys.
When it comes to a true picture of the chippy culture battle between the different regions of England, I truly reccomend Stuart Macconie's Pies and Prejudice. All English people know that the north of England is a very different place to the south- it's just something never talked about to forigners.
I'm not really suprised about the Carolina thing- I mean, in Herriot's Yorkshire, they still had the two forms of you after about 50 years of near-universal literacy, reasonable roads and radio broadcasts (in fact, we had a Yorkshire girl in our class in the late nineties who still used 'thou' and '-sen' for '-self', all those Herriot things. And they say that some features of American speech are closer to 15th-16th century English than the English of 21st century England anyway (though I doubt that it's an exact match- and anyway, factors like the elongated 'a'- as in 'bath' having the long a of 'car' instead of the short 'a' of 'apple', which are a late 18th century development in England (yes, even the Swanns and Navy officers shouldn't actually be using them, but that would totally confuse the average audience member) are, as you know, only actually a feature of south-easten English anyway (well, they are in West Country (ie Barbossa-speak), but they've always been there, and prior to about 1780 were actually considered rustic and not classy in the slightest).
(Best bit? The expression 'arr'- despite what T'n'T seem to think- is not a meaningless piraty ejaculation, but West Country dialect for 'yes'. Probably associated with scurvy dogs because the West Country was a convieniant place for smuggling, wrecking etc..)