Well, i know that the accents vary quite a great deal from one part of France to the other, and between them and the Belgians, the Swiss, the many African nations which are francophone (whose accents vary one to the other), the French Canadian, the francophone Berbers and Arabs. I've also been reliably informed that Latin Americans with some travel experience can spot a Spanish-speaker's country of origin by his or her speech. I know they make god awful jokes about the Argentines . . .
I rather suspect this is true in all languages--if there is perhaps more variety in English, that might result from more variety of "climate" in which it is spoken, as well as quasi-isolated parallel development. I don't necessarily know that one would be claiming the palm by asserting there is more variety of accent.
And going back to the post which prompted this, maybe it is true of all languages!
By the by, Miss Elephant, have you ever read the short story, All Yankees Are Liars, by Eric Knight? It appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (an American rag) in January, 1938, but has since appeared in many anthologies. Mr. Knight used the pen name Sam Small when it was published. I tried to find a copy online, but so far have failed.
I'm not sure I should answer that if I'm called Miss Elephant. No is the answer, anyway. Let me know if you find it!
I'll see if i can ever hunt it up . . . the basic premise is that an Amerian in Yorkshire starts telling about corn which is twelve feet high and the like, and the story revolves around differences in language which make him seem a liar to the locals. Mr. Knight is the author of Lassie.
Miss Elephant is a reference to the avatar picture you once used, to which i had responded with Ogden Nash's poetry . . .
. . . his teeth are upside down, outside!
Clary Wrote:
Quote:And going back to the post which prompted this, maybe it is true of all languages!
Yes, this was my next thought. I wonder which language has the most sounds. English, according to what I read, has 44. I want to know which ones are disputable,
, and why. Haven't found that yet, but I'm not finished looking.
Virago
Virago
Quote:I read recently that there is a disagreement among language experts on the actual number of sounds in the English language. Hmm. Anyone know why?
Virago
Quote:
Yes, this was my next thought. I wonder which language has the most sounds. English, according to what I read, has 44. I want to know which ones are disputable,
, and why. Haven't found that yet, but I'm not finished looking.
Interesting topic, Virago. One thing you might want to consider wrt your first question
Quote:, and someone might have mentioned this already, is that the same sound can be perceived by a speaker of another language as something different than what we perceive it to be.
Because these "sounds" are applied strictly to our own language in order to effect a certain meaning, our brains don't allow us to consider other possibilities, though at birth and for a short time thereafter, all these "other language" possible sounds were available to us.
For example, we English speakers think that Japanese can't say 'L' but actually they can. They just can't say it consistently or at the appropriate times because their language uses the mechanics of the mouth and tongue to combine the 'L' and 'R' sounds.
{Actually that's not really true either; they aren't combining any sounds. They're merely creating one set sound from their own language. I'm just putting in a perspective that an English speaker can understand}
This presents no problem for them when speaking Japanese, but it creates untold difficulties when they move to English. Sometimes, [as a native speaker of English], I can hear, from a Japanese speaking Japanese, an 'L' and sometimes I can hear an 'R' despite the fact that Japanese does not have an 'L' sound.
Japanese, speaking with each other, never hear an 'L' sound simply because it doesn't occur to them to be aware of it, because for them it doesn't exist.
Could you please post the article where you read about this first or provide a link?
Quote:though at birth and for a short time thereafter, all these "other language" possible sounds were available to us.
This would be why, I suppose, that try as I might I cannot repeat the sounds I hear on my Russian language tape. Most of the time, I can't even imagine how those sounds are formed, and when I try it - well, it's just sad. Southern Girl Speaks Russian could be a sideshow at a carnival. "Da svydanya, sweetie. Y'all come back now."
Quote:Could you please post the article where you read about this first or provide a link?
I would be happy to do that. Except, I read it in an article discussing how phonics is taught at an elementary level while waiting for my son at the library. So I don't have it, but the rest of it didn't really apply. The article focused on teaching rather than language.
Thank you so much for the link. What you posted explains quite a lot, and though I haven't made it through all 51 pages yet, it's interesting to read. Nice to learn this sort of thing. :wink:
Virago
That's good. I wish I had the patience.
Virago wrote:Quote:though at birth and for a short time thereafter, all these "other language" possible sounds were available to us.
This would be why, I suppose, that try as I might I cannot repeat the sounds I hear on my Russian language tape. Most of the time, I can't even imagine how those sounds are formed, and when I try it - well, it's just sad. Southern Girl Speaks Russian could be a sideshow at a carnival. "Da svydanya, sweetie. Y'all come back now."
Virago
This cracked me up. I majored in Slavic languages at North Carolina, and to hear some of my classmates with the really heavy accents trying to sound Russian was pretty freakin' hilarious.
Hi LionTamer,
Glad my predicament made you laugh.
Someone should certainly laugh. I sound ridiculous, but I'm too stubborn to quit trying.
Virago
I learned conversational French from West Africans. Their pronunciaiton and accent is rather good, but still noticeable. The most signal characteristic of their use of French is that when confronted with a situation in which they do not know the common expression for something, they will make up a comprehensible expression on the spot. Were you to criticize them for it, they'd just laugh and invite you, with a smile, to join the conversation.
When i took the Foreign Service Institute exam for French i scored fairly high--and the test results came back with the comment that the reviewer believed the subject was of West African origin.
I just laughed.
Setanta wrote:I learned conversational French from West Africans. Their pronunciaiton and accent is rather good, but still noticeable. The most signal characteristic of their use of French is that when confronted with a situation in which they do not know the common expression for something, they will make up a comprehensible expression on the spot. Were you to criticize them for it, they'd just laugh and invite you, with a smile, to join the conversation.
Setanta,
Aren't these people native speakers of French?
They are, but so are the cheese farmers of Quebec, the denizens of Tickfaw, Louisiana and the matronly woman behind the desk at the H'otel in Paris. Put one of each together in a room for a lesson in how language changes in isolation. They would all be able to understand each other but they would have to listen to get past all the changes in rhythms, vowel lengths and other splices and dices done by time and distance.
I had a guy from some place in Northern Ireland come into the store last Tuesday. He spoke English, but at a pace I've never heard before, absolutely rapidfire.
Do/you/na/ha/oo/rooba/hamuh?
I said I did and I got him one.
$4.99 for the large one.
Joe Nation
A what? A rubber hammer? Just wondered.
(yes, I know there are rubber hammers and mallets of all types)
Folks from both ends of Ireland do tend to speak very rapidly at times. They are a very intelligent people(s)
I have somewhere a creole newspaper I bought in Mauritius - now there is French taken to extremes. And I bought a music tape called Lappel lorizon. The Parisian civil servants who were posted there were called Zoreilles!
The French of Canada were largely in place before the establishment of the Academy, so their language developed in an isolation not apparent in other francophone communities. There are significant francophone minorities in Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan (les Fransaskois) and British Columbia. Accadie was the name given to the general maratime region of the French colony of New France, and the American Cajuns are descended from them (the name for a denizen, accadien is properly pronounced "ah-kah-djien" which was corrupted into cajun). West of the lakes, les coureurs du bois (literally, "the runners in the woods") married into local Cree bands, and produced the métis, who lived in clan and tribal groups, moving about the prairies in their wagons, and subsisting as buffalo hunters and carters. They chiefly lived in what became Manitoba, and the fransaskois and Franco-Columbians are descended from them, but still linguistically and culturally distinct. Even the francophones of Ontario considered themselves to be culturally distinct from the québecois.
The Québecois dialect is sometimes referred to as Joual, although strictly speaking, that is a term for the working class dialect in particular regions, and is often used as a pejorative among them. More than six million Québecois use French as their first langauge, and this is nearly ten percent of the world-wide francophone population. "Subdialects" in the east are Saguenay French, spoken in that river valley and in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, and gaspésie français, spoken once throughout the maratime region of the Gaspé, but now largely spoken only in Gaspésie-îles-de-la-Madeleine. This would once have been cognate with the accadien dialect, from which Cajun is descended. New Brunswick is about one third francophone, and theirs is the surviving accadien. The métis dialect is known as michif and combines French and the language of the Cree Indians.
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When i briefly lived in Ireland, i developed the ability to mimic regional accents. A couple i met from Belfast, who lived in the Falls Road (dangerous territory during the late troubles) used to ask me to do my Norn Iron, and then would invariably tell me it sent chills through them, because they claimed i sounded just like Ian Paisley. Not really sure that was such a good thing, but it was a small enough thing to please them.
Two other notes: joual is the word for horse or stallion as used by that subdialect, and is descended from cheval--developed in isolation indeed!
There are many neighborhoods in Dublin in which the English-speakers' accent sounds like Canadian or eastern American English, to such an extent that i was often asked if i were from Dublin, and specifically from Ballsbridge (?).
Always speaking about the French when I'm out!...
