A #Linguistics question prompted by "Crime Wave at Blandings", the first story in "Lord Emsworth and Others, which I currently #AmReading. PGW has Lord Emsworth saying "dooce" a lot. In my quasi-literate ignorance, that seems like an Americanism, the sort of thing PGW might have picked from living there. Would a very English Earl of the era have said "deuce" as "dooce" , or would he have been more like to say /djuːs/ ? @bookstodon
@ancientsounds@bookstodon Thank you. I did wonder - I've been suprised before by "U" vs "Non-U" in cases where usage and/or pronunciation was the reverse of what I would have expected. Proof of my being very non-U, ofc. 😀
@ronsboy67@bookstodon
Before the introduction of “the wireless”, aristocrats had a far wider range of accents than just RP (which was associated only with certain public schools). Broad Devon, Norfolk or Yorkshire, for example, could be heard in the House of Lords or at the Royal Court. The BBC really created the idea of a uniform “good pronunciation”.
(But don't ask me for a citation though ... Too much homework.)
@ancientsounds@bookstodon That Beeb model is the one that so many devoutly bourgeois Kiwi parents and teachers tried to impose on kids here. Sisyphus had an easier job, of course.😀
@ancientsounds@bookstodon Yes, David Crystal covered the inception of the BBC accent, the institution's decades-long suppression of regional accents and its shift in policy in a few of his books. Quite informative, parallels here to the reaction of some when broadcasters started embracing both Māori and Māori English.
@ronsboy67@ancientsounds@bookstodon That's interesting. In the US, it seems broadcasting simply grabbed folks from the Midwest, and with a little moderation the general midwestern accent came to be accepted as "no accent."
@Grizzlysgrowls@ancientsounds@bookstodon Yes, the "no accent" thing from US English speakers amuses me greatly. Apparently 72% of Americans said they'd prefer to dated someone with an accent. Not sure I want to know what the other 28% are into
@ronsboy67@ancientsounds@bookstodon Back in the 1970s I was doing Shakespeare with an "imagist" theatre group. The director contended that the Midwestern US accent was very close to the speech of Shakespeare's time, accent-wise.
@Grizzlysgrowls@ancientsounds@bookstodon Not according to YouTube 😀 David Crystal's son Ben is one of the leading proponents of Shakespeare done in 'authentic' accents, the results don't sound much like Midwestern US to me.
Nah, not really. For an accent (or language) with vowels that pre-date the Great Vowel Shift, you need to look to Northumbrian English or Scots (e.g. "hoose", "nicht" etc.) That's where I get my "Middle English" audio data from.
@ancientsounds@Grizzlysgrowls@bookstodon Thanks. I didn't buut the story, but it is widespread. It's not just a problem with English either. I have friends who are L2 Tamil speakers (L1 Malayalam and Badaga, Tamil their mutual) and they used to practically genuflect when talking about Sri Lankan Tamil and how "pure" it was
@ronsboy67@ancientsounds@bookstodon Was fascinated hearing about first close looks at Sanskrit, and finding in it the roots of many of the European languages. Do love me some history!
@Grizzlysgrowls@ronsboy67@bookstodon
Strictly speaking Sanskrit is not really "in the roots of" European languages. Rather, Sanskrit and most European languages have a shared ancestry in the same root language (Proto-Indo-European). In consequence, there are a lot of similarities - sometimes very close - between Sanskrit and e.g. Slavic languages, Lithuanian, etc.
(A bit-nitpicky, but I feel a professional duty to dispel any misunderstanding that European languages evolved from Sanskrit.)
@ancientsounds@ronsboy67@bookstodon I suppose one could argue that Seamas was right in a "spiritual" sense. Shakespeare wrote much of it for the Groundlings, and at least in the US we sound like the Groundlings of today.
@Grizzlysgrowls@ancientsounds@bookstodon I'm biased toward New England accents myself - NZE is VERY non-rhotic 😀 (though becoming less so, thanks to coca-colanisation)
@Grizzlysgrowls@ronsboy67@bookstodon
Similar in the UK in that a lot of people with RP accents say or think that they have "no accent". (It isn't strictly a regional accent, tbf.)
@kinyutaka@bookstodon Excellent, thanks! I knew that "what the deuce" was a euphemism for "what the Devil" but didn't know about the pronunciation. My local library cancelled its subs to the OED a couple of years ago, sadly. 😢
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