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Post by Twoddle on Nov 25, 2008 19:49:53 GMT
>Orange, surely< Provocative? Orange (in Old English) was geoluhread, which translates into Modern English as yellow-red. Tone Thanks, Tone. Mind you, that still leaves a gap between about 1100 and 1542. I can imagine them buying medieval wallpaper: "Oh, I do like that one with the images of the plague pits, but I really fancy something with a bit more of that half-way-between-red-and-yellow-but-not-quite-golden colour in it".
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Post by Beedge on Dec 30, 2021 6:39:14 GMT
.I'm truly amazed , that some people , wish to perpetuate the pure BS of " The Best Accent Dialect !" I mean REALLY , who gives a bugger ?...as long as you can understand what's being said ! I'm now only 8 Weeks short of 82 years old......I grew up during WW2....by the end of the conflict , I must have rubbued shpoulders with at least 12# Regional Dialects ! Owing to being attacked physically by Hampshire Yobos, from day One of starting School in 1946 ( Kinson, near Bournemouth), I fast became VERY Self Defensive....These apes picked on me , because I spoke with a soft S.Welsh dialect...that of my dear ould Mum. I never saw my Dad ,until 1947 , when he was De-mobbed from the RAF in India, where he had been since 1941. SO when I saw some half-wit,writing about , how he could'nt stand Prof Alice Roberts manner of speech...I just saw red ! Like a Kinson Yokel Yobo ! Jeez ! What I could have done to that Mongrel in a Wrestling Ring , given five minutes with the Eedjit ! Wonder how he talks ?? He'd a' had a job saying anything after "Five in the Ring" with me ! God Bless Yis , Prof Alice, you are one of VERY few Professionals, who ever bothered to answer my Queries about Anthropology, and Antiquaries of any kind ! Have a Blesed New year , and 'doncha go'n change that luvley Bristol Dialect , for any dern 'Prune ! As our mutual friend Phil Harding would say :- Oh arrgh !" Noitie Noit from New Zealand, Saty Safe, Take Care , and don't stop SMILING ! @! Cheers , Bruce Graham
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Post by Verbivore on Dec 30, 2021 11:20:26 GMT
Well g'day there, Bruce – from Oz across the ditch.
Hold on to whatever accent you have. I treasure the variety of English-speaker dialects and accents and would hate for them to become bland and homogenised.
And a Happy New Year to you!
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Dec 30, 2021 17:56:24 GMT
Welcome to the forum, Bruce. Amazing that you should have resurrected a thread which folded years before I joined.
But I think accents do matter. Whether they should matter is another thing altogether. But, surely, it is true that some accents are almost impenetrable to a listener and that can’t be a good thing. I have listened to a number of live broadcasts from the UK House of Commons and it is sometimes very difficult to know what Scottish members are saying. This must attract from the effectiveness of their speeches. Moreover one probably would not want to be represented in court by a barrister who spoke with an accent generally regarded as uncultivated because it might also sound ill-informed to the jury. That might be unjustified, even undesirable, but I think it is real.
On a slightly different, but related, aspect of life, when I was a social worker it was always felt that it was important for one to wear a suit and tie rather than jeans and a tee-shirt in the family court in order that the people one was representing were given the best chance of a good hearing. We even kept a spare tie in the office for just such an eventuality.
One might object to such attitudes on the basis that they run contrary to ideas social equality and inclusiveness but they cannot be ignored
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Post by Twoddle on Dec 30, 2021 23:17:23 GMT
Accents and dialects don't bother me, provided I can understand what's being said, but there's an unfortunate and growing tendency for UK news reporters, TV announcers and the like to use poor pronunciation, and that really gets up my nose. "Th" should never be pronounced as "F", "V" or "D", glottles and dropped aitches (not "haitches") are unacceptable, and words ending in "ng" should be pronounced exactly like that - not as "n'". Presumably, poor pronunciation is trendy, or woke, or something similarly silly.
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Post by Verbivore on Dec 31, 2021 0:39:53 GMT
Twod: Aussie newsreaders have in recent times been required to master the 'ng' (ƞ) at the beginning of Indigenous AU words or syllables. For a long while, that sound at the beginning of a word was, lazily, pronounced as n, as in the (non-Indigenous) name Ngaire (commonly said as Naire).
As Oz is now in the process of dual-naming places, using both the European / imported names and the Indigenous names, as well as now referring to Indigenous Aussies as, e.g., 'a Wiradjeri (wo)man', the pronunciation of ƞ has become more widespread because many such tribal names start with or include an ƞ. No idea how or if 'g-droppers' are coping with that (perhaps they don't give a rat's).
It's probably 'wokeness' to a degree, but a move I approve of on both linguistic and cultural-respect grounds.
One thing I've noticed of many British English-speakers is the hard g at the end of ~ing words, e.g. startin-g – more like ƞ+g. That's not much heard among Aussies.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Dec 31, 2021 3:30:50 GMT
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam is the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of the UK and has become prominent in the media during the Covid pandemic. I recently discovered that his middle is Nguyen which is a common family name in Viet Nam (apparently Professor Van-Tam has some Vietnamese ancestry). I recall when I visited Vietnam there was a long discussion in the group about how the name should be pronounced. The discovery of Professor Van-Tam’s name led me to research anew the pronunciation of the name.
Of course, I Googled it and found a long and rambling discussion in a forum the name of which I can no longer remember. Although some contributors thought it should be pronounced N-goo-yen, this was rejected by most who, quoting friends in the the San Francisco Vietnamese expatriate community, recommended simply WIN. A Vietnam contributor required the ƞ phonetic but described differences between the pronunciation in North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The recommendation which seemed to be the most authoritatively acceptable suggested that it should be pronounced RINGWIN but as one syllable without the RI sound, that is ƞwin.
And this brings me to the final comment in Vv’s post where he mentions the use of a hard G in words like ring in British English. I have to say that I do not use such a hard G where it finishes the word but I do use it in the middle of the word such as ringing [ riƞ-giƞ ].
I have to say that I find trying to say Nguyen in the approved way very difficult. Explanations on the internet about how to say it involve contortions of the tongue which seems to take far too long to enable one to use it as one syllable. I hope Australian newsreaders will have more success than me (than I) . I can just about manage to say it in a separate word but if it comes into a sentence I have to be satisfied with GWIN which, when spoken quickly seems at least to me to be almost the same. Incidentally, I googled “NG pronunciation” and got “about” 900,000,000 hits!
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Post by Dave Miller on Dec 31, 2021 5:14:09 GMT
We’re talking here of ng~ words in several different cultures and I’d guess that the pronunciation might vary across them.
I encountered it when learning Cantonese, which has an extreme version: the word for “five”, for example, is romanised to just ng. There’s no follow-on vowel sound to help you! (Ng also has other meanings and is a common surname.)
I think I managed an acceptable articulation of it (it seemed to be understood, anyway), having been taught, at the Government Language School, to use the sound from “singing and dancing. (It’s easier, first, to learn to pronounce “ngan” from singingandancing.)
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