Um, sorry Akatsukami, but you’ve completely lost me here. Who said anything about Catalan?
Arrgh. Thought I had that formatting-quotes thing down.
excuse me, Konrad, but I think that you meant beautiful instead of silly. No doubt a typographical error, or a mistake in vocabulary from a non-native english speaker.
android209 said
‘In the UK, specifically England, where people haven’t had their accents schooled out of them, I reckon you can place someone by their accent to within about 50 miles or so, they differ so greatly… eg compare a Mancunian (Manchester) to his enemy the other end of the East Lancs the Scouser (Liverpool) (sorry, about 20 miles) and you’ll wonder if they were born on the same planet, never mind part of the country.’
This is pretty true for people who have retained their original accents. Indeed I once literally had to translate between a Scotsman and a Geordie (slang - person from NE England, usually Newcastle). However if you’ve got an ‘educated’ accent (sorry, that’s not a good description), then you’re anonymous. My pupils don’t know where I’m from originally unless I return to my North London accent. ‘Leave it out, mate!’
I like the TV comedy ‘Frasier’ very much, but I have no idea what accent Daphne is using. Apparently it’s supposed to be from Manchester - well it isn’t! (But I think she is an English actress.)
I took French in high school. My first-semester teacher in Lawndale High, CA, was a French-Canadian woman, and I imitated her pronunciation, of course. Then we moved, and I spent the rest of my high-school time at Redondo Union High School (Class of '67). Anyway, the second-semester teacher was named Al Wilson, and he taught Spanish and Russian as well as French. For the next three years I had a Hispanic (named Gonzales) as a French teacher. Years later I knew a family from Montreal; the parents spoke English with a French-Canadian accent, and they could understand me when I spoke French; but the kids grew up in Southern California, and they could not understand my French.
Melatonin: I haven’t heard Poles speak Russian, but damn! It would have to be pretty bad to rival typical American pronunciation.
(Embarrassing admission: once, in Moscow, I was mistaken for a Bulgarian.)
Akutsakami:
Umm… Hochdeutsch, to the best of my knowledge and belief, is what Standard German is now generally called, wherever in Germany it is spoken, and regardless of its origins; has been the language of educated Germans for almost three centuries at least, if not longer. The purest form of Standard German is often held to be spoken in the area around Hanover. What can be confusing is the existence in Germany of many dialects (Mundart), spoken in parallel with Hochdeutsch - a Swabian or a Bavarian will very often speak both Hochdeutsch and their respective dialects on different occasions. In North German, people often speak both Hoch- and Platt-deutsch, depending on the occasion (not at the same time, obviously). Hanover is certainly in the Platt-deutsch region, but nevertheless the Hanoverian form of Hochdeutsch is often taken as an unofficial standard.
Hochachtungsvoll…
…and I’ve just noiced this:
What on earth…? It is news to me that “Scots” as opposed to “Scots Gaelic” is dying out (presuming that by this you mean English as spoken by Scots people). May I ask your grounds for this somewhat puzzling remark?
Arnold sez:
Oh you mean beautiful as in “I think Monty Python is very beautiful”?
Melatonin sez:
Is it the accent or the tempo/inotonation? I always thought Polish and Russian had very similar sounds (not the sound of the language being spoken but sounds of letters).
There’s a lot of Russian phrases that sound funny to Poles. For example ‘said’ in Russian is ‘skazal’. So when Poles hear Russians talking they hear ‘He signalled to me’ instead of ‘He told me’, as if everybody were using sign language or something.
Or the Czech word for ice cream is ‘zmarzliny’. In Polish that would mean ‘things that have frozen to death’.
Danes speak Danish (Have you heard this language???)
I have a Danish speaker in the house. She’s not a native Dane. I attempted to follow conversation last summer in denmark, and it was hard. I can figure out about half of a written text. That part shouldn’t be harder than most languages.
Poles and Russians and Czechs, oh my. . .
The accent sounds American to me. Not the intonation. I’m not comparing the Polish accent to the typical American student’s accent, but rather to the accent of an American who’s presumably had some training in phonetics. After returning my first trip to Moscow, my initial reaction to speaking with my Polish prof of Russian literature was, “Wow, she’s really got an American accent.” Later, however, I got a chance to hear more Poles speak Russian and came to the conclusion that the accents are similar.
I suppose Russian and Polish have a lot of sounds in common, but being as one is a E.Slavic and the other is W.Slavic, there are surely a lot of fundamental differences which an actual linguist could probably tell you more about. One thing I do remember distinctly about Polish phonology is that it seems to differentiate between a much greater number of hushers than does Russian. (Like, what the fuck is supposed to be the difference between a hard zh and a soft one?)
The vowels are also quite different- those goofy a’s or e’s (don’t remember which) with the diacritic represent sounds that simply don’t belong to Russian. Maybe it’s the vowel sounds. Dunno.
I am humbled to say I know nothing whatsoever about Czech, other than the fact that it’s incredibly difficult and seems to share a lot fewer roots than do many of the other Slavic languages. For most of the major members of the Slavic family, I can conjure up at least some key phrase, “Thank you” or “The child is fat” or something, but I don’t know a damn word of Czech.
Have lived in Spain for ten years, as a matter of fact in Catalonia. My take on accents: In Spain, the only really noticeable regional accent is Andaluz, spoken in the South around Seville, Cordoba, Malaga, and Granada. Its main characteristics are dropping the “s” at the end of words and pronouncing the “z” and the “c” before “e” and “i” like an English “s” rather than like an English “th”. North of Andalusia, the Spanish spoken in Spain is reasonably uniform. It is said that the “purest” Spanish is spoken in North Castile, in the area of Soria, Burgos, and Valladolid. Of course, anyone who’s ever taken a course in linguistics knows that this concept is nuts, but it is true that those areas are the regions of Spain where the pronunciation of the spoken language is most similar to what is written.
As far as Latin American Spanish goes, it’s true that Argentinians and Uruguayans convert the “y” and “ll” sounds to something like “zh” and that they use the “vos” form rather than the “tu” form for the second person familiar singular. I generally find Latin Americans harder to understand than Spaniards, but that’s due to my living in Barcelona rather than in, say, Mexico. Mexican Spanish has a sing-song lilt to my ear, and I’d agree that Caribbean Spanish (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic) is the hardest for non-natives to decipher.
As for Catalan, don’t get me started. Go fifty miles in any direction and the accent is different.
No, I think Akatsukami means Scots, which is not the same thing as English-as-spoken-by-Scots-people.
Durnovarianus writes:
No argument there; I agree completely with what you’re saying.
This may be the sticking point. I agree that Germans (by which I mean the inhabitants of the Federal Republic of Germany, FTR) almost all speak Hochdeutsch (or High German; SFAIK, the two terms are used interchangably); it’s the standard, literary language of Germany. The Hochdeutsch that is learned in the Hanover area may be taken as the standard of the standard; I do not have information on that. Nonetheless, as Hanover is a North German city, the local native tongue is likely Plattdeutsch; or, given that Hanover is the capital of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen), it might be Low Saxon, neither of which languages are mutually intelligible with the spoken form of High German.
I am a bit opposed to the phrase “English as spoken by Scots people”. Scots (as again opposed to Scots Gaelic, which is another language and case altogether), as I use the term, is that language descended largely from Northumbrian Saxon, and very definitely liguistically and politically separated from those dialects that we would call “English” from the 14th to 17th centuries; it has a separate literature (the first to write in Scots was, I think, James I of Scotland (not to be confused with his great[sup]4[/sup]-grandson, James I of England (and James VI of Scotland))). This is different from Scots speaking with regional or interference accents.
For informational purposes, I recommend the Ethnologue, 13th Edition at SIL International, which contains more information than most of us probably want to know.
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch do not refer to regions, but to the level of education or background the speaker has. Hochdeutsch is the German equivalent of Oxford English.
Plattdeutsch might sound like spoken Dutch, but not to anyone who speaks both these languages.
German is a very ‘regulated’ language, whereas Dutch does have rules, but there are 1 million exceptions. Therefore, for a foreigner to learn to speak colloqiol (sp?) Dutch is much harder than it is in German.
The Dutch have a tendency to speak multiple languages because:
a) we were quite early on traveling the globe, relocating Africans, interacting with Native Americans, fighting Brits, Germans, Frogs, etc etc;
b) we’re so small, nobody’s gonna learn OUR language, so we might as well adapt.
Having said that, I think Dutch is actually the fifth language in the world if you count all dialects and spin-offs like South African. But mostly that’s due to the fact that the Chinese and the Indian people don’t have a common language - within their respective countries even, that is.
Thank, TVeblen. Great compliment. Bear in mind I’m posting this one quite late and quite drunk…
Most Dutch can easily manage the “th” sound though. And the “ch” or even “g” as in Scheveningen (a coastal village near The Hague) does come closest to the Scottish “Loch” pronunciation. Although it’s still a bit off the mark. My boss is English, and after 5 years in Holland he still can’t manage that sound, although his vcabulary is pretty good. Learning Dutch while in Holland is hard though: any Dutchman, even the most uneducated super market employee, will immediately switch to English is he hears someone struggling and - generally - butchering Dutch 
It drives my foreign colleagues NUTS. Ah Well, there’s always the bilingual coffee machine 
I can detect most English accents. I can tell my Kiwi’s (Hi Guano !) from my Aussies, my Scots from my Welsh, my Brits from my Irish, and my Southern US from my Northern US. A Canadian is an easy pick too - must be the ‘eh’ ending every sentence. Eh ?
Also, the “oot and aboot” thing is definately true.
I’m sure Durnovarious, being a true Limey and all, could tell I was Dutch if he spoke to me. As a matter of fact, I send an audio fiel to GuanoLad the other day to let him determine my accent. He said it was definately Brit, but he could still tell I was Dutch. Mind you, there’s a huge amount of Dutchies in New Zealand !
Oh wellll… more practise then. I’ll conquer the Oxford English one day - this I thee vow.
Off to bed now, it’s 2 AM here !
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
What sort of amuses me is Viennese German – many MANY of the words are totally different from Hochdeutsch (maybe this counts for all of Austria though-- not sure), and the intonation is this very light, lilting singsong-- sort of how Liverpool English (think Ringo) sounds. Instead of Pflaume (plum) they use Zwetschken (the most German sounding word I’ve ever heard), instead of schlitten-fahren (sledding) they say roedeln, and to say good-bye they often use a phrase which I haven’t quite grasped yet, but it sounds like “PAH-pahhh”. Instead of Broetschen (rolls–the bready things) it’s Semmeln, etc etc. Also, as it’s still a good Catholic country it’s never New Years-- it’s Sylvester, which really takes some thinking to figure out.
Parisien v.s. Québecois (a.k.a. Joual)
(Warning! Long post ahead.)
I used to work at a place where I met many French tourists coming to visit Québec, and I picked up many differences between the two ways of speaking.
French people seem to pronounce ‘en’ and ‘an’ almost the same way that they pronounce ‘on’. In Québec, ‘en’ and ‘an’ are more like a nasal vowel closer to ‘a’ than to ‘o’.
The ‘r’ sound more grating in Parisien French.
In Québecois, an ‘s’ sound is added after a ‘t’ and a ‘z’ sound is added after a ‘d’ when these consonnants are followed by the sounds ‘i’ or ‘u’. "Vas-tu dinner?’ sounds like “Va-tsu dzinner?”
Here’s how you conjugate the verb ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ in Québecois, the underline is to indicate liaison:
Être
1 pers. sing. “chu”
2 pers. sing. “t’é”
3 pers. sing. “y’é” (masc.) “int” (fém.)
1 pers. plur. “on_é”
2 pers. plur. “vous_êtes” (hardly used)
3 pers. plur. “y sont”
Avoir
1 pers. sing. “j’ai”
2 pers. sing. “t’â”
3 pers. sing. “y’â” (masc.) “al â” (fém.)
1 pers. plur. “on_â”
2 pers. plur. “vous_avez” (hardly used)
3 pers. plur. “y’ont” or “ys_ont”
“Je” becomes "j’ " or "ch’ " even in front of consonants. For example, “j’viens”, “ch’t’en prie”, “j’reviens” also pronounce “j’erviens”.
“Tu” becomes "t’ " in front of a vowel.
“Il” becomes “i”, which I wrote “y” earlier because it’s a short sound.
“Elle” becomes “a”, as in “A veut v’nir avec nous.”
“Nous” is almost never used as a subject. It is almost always subsituted by “on”.
“Vous” used for politness is rarely used in everyday speech. It sounds very formal in Québecois.
“Ils” and “elles” becomes “i”.
Now, there is no such thing as written ‘joual’ so don’t try translating a brochure like that. Written and spoken speech have diverged a lot in Québec. That’s why Québecois feel that French speak like textbooks.
Inside Canada and Québec there are many regionalisms too. I had a friend from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Québec who would say something like “Int_allée pêrhé sur sa rhaloupe avec son rhien,” “rh” being somewhat like the Spanish “j”. In textbook French that would be “Elle est allée pêcher sur sa chaloupe avec son chien.” And then there are the people from Gaspé and Îles-de-la-Madeleine who say “Ch’t’eul DIS” (Je te le dis) for emphasis. It’s hard to explain, but it sound funny to everyone else.
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop now. I’ll answer the OP in my next messge, I promise.
À r’voyure. (À la prochaine.) See ya. Sorry, see you.
Only humans commit inhuman acts.
I speak Quebecois French, & my SO is from Marseilles (South of France). He can’t understand me at all. I can barely understand him.
I think that, generally, French Canadians understand the French better than the French understand them. I think it’s because Québecois study textbook French, not joual, so Parisien French doesn’t sound completely alien.
As for English, my first language is French, but I can vaguely distinguish accents. I’ll recognize Aussies and Kiwis, but not distinguish one from the other. I usually guess correctly when diffentiating between Irish, Scotish, and English. Canadians and Americans aren’t easy to distinguish, in spite of me being Canadian. Some accents, like the southern drawl, are dead give aways, though.
Only humans commit inhuman acts.
I’m a Linguistics major, a proud montréalais, and the ex-lover of a Québécois who could affect a perfect Parisian accent if he wanted to.
Québécois French has many more vowel sounds than Parisian French. In fact, it has more distinct vowel allophones than any other language except for this obscure Turkish dialect.
Example: In Parisian French the word loup (silent “p”) has the same vowel as louche. In Québécois French it does not. Most vowel phonemes in Québécois French take a different form before a consonant.
Also, Québécois tend to vouvoie (address as “vous”) less often than Parisians. Typically, rather than all strangers, they will basically vouvoie important people (officials, bosses, clergy, etc.) and clients who are middle-aged or over. I have to say, being 18 I don’t mind getting tutoied by a young person, but it bugs me when the hostile metro attendant tutoies me; it’s like he’s making it clear who’s the elder and who’s the younger, rather than who’s the client and who’s the service person. Anyway, it’s somewhat classier to vouvoie everyone, but it’s considered icing.