> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > Boris Liberman
> On 5/5/2011 16:55, mike wilson wrote: > > Southern Scotland. That's not bad for a native speaker to understand. > > Here's a selection of more extreme versions from the same area. > > http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rab+c+nesbitt&aq=f > > Hmmm. I think you live relatively close to there, right (*)? Mike lives in the part of England that has probably the most impenetrable accent of all. People here like Scottish accents, although the chap in the BBC video has a rather difficult one - Glasgow, I think, like Rab C Nesbit. But people with Scottish accents are much sought after to work on telephone help desks. It's probably something to do with the way they pronounce "See you, Jimmy". > Also, I > suppose you meant to say "non-native speaker" if you were referring to > me. But I appreciate the slip of your tongue :-). > Plenty of native English speakers struggle with some of the regional accents. Especially people from the South, but I was barred from a pub in Manchester once because the landlord didn't like my accent. > One of the popular science programs here has a presenter that always > raises his voice towards the end of the sentences. He sounds vaguely > similar to this accent except that his is perfectly clear. Well, he's a > popular science program presenter after all. > Send a Youtube link if you can find one. It'd be interesting to hear. The rising intonation is a new thing to British English, having come here from New Zealand within the last 20 or so years, and is generally restricted to young women. Maybe your presenter is not British. The British Library has an interesting archive of regional accents. This is what Mike Wilson sounds like: <http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/england/byker/> B > Wondrous, wondrous indeed. > > (*) No hint, no pun, nothing, merely pointing out something that > occurred to me. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
