OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's possible I'm being harder on Krivit than necessary.Nevertheless, > his handling or Rossi's broken English was the straw that really broke > the back for me. > That was tacky. Also, strangely old-fashioned. People used to do that in popular culture and movies in the 1930s. I think people more often assumed that a foreign accent or an unusual native speaker accent is a sign of low education or low intelligence. Many people are still biased against Southern accents, and Appalachian dialects (so-called hillbilly accents). People go to classes to rid themselves of these dialects. It is a crying shame because they are among the oldest and most expressive forms of English. In Japan people are also biased against regional and rural dialects, which are rapidly disappearing. This may impact my retirement plans for when I am 90, blind and wheelchair bound. I hope to spend my remaining days ensconced in the back room of some seedy bar or house of prostitution in Kyoto where I can listen to the way the women talk. It doesn't matter what they say: I just can't get enough of that rising intonation, the negative (-hen) and those copulas. Hubba hubba! My wife is from Yamaguchi, which is quite different from Kyoto. It is similar to Appalachian English, with words hundreds of years out of date, like the English "yonder." - Jed
