TheRedPriest wrote:Da niint ward accent shares soitin' characteristics wit da Bronx, cause boat cities had heavy Irish immigration.
That's a widely-believed fact!
The truth is that no Irish accent whatsoever has a vowel sound even remotely like that, I'm afraid.
To be honest, I only have one official source on this, a local, amateur historian, but reliable for an amateur all the same.
Surely there's going to be some significant corruption. IIRC, the Irish and Germans settled in close proximity in the city during the same time frame. I'm, rather proudly, descended from both lines on my mother's side. N'awlins was second only to N.Y. as a destination for immigrants in the 19th century. If not the common ancestry for parts of New Orleans and N.Y., I don't know how else to account for the similarities in speech.
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." - Joseph Campbell
PapersAndPaychecks wrote:All this should lead any impartial viewer to realise the basic quality of any British institution, which is that it has to be incomprehensible to foreigners.
The BBC is totally comprehensible. After all, there is a lot of variation of accents in Great Britain itself.
I used to work with a Scottish lady who related to me that she found the Scots dialect of Aberdeen incomprehensible, so much so that she thought they were speaking a foreign language.
But if the British don't want foreigners watching their television shows, I'm happy to oblige.
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PapersAndPaychecks wrote:
This is fundamental to British culture.
Some of us live in counties called things like "Hertfordshire" (pronounced "HART-ford-shire") or "Leicestershire" (pronounced "LES-ter-shire") and towns called things like "Worcester" (pronounced "WOOS-ter"), "Cholmondeley" (pronounced "CHUM-ley") or (my local fave) "Braughing" (and I'll give you ten points if you can tell me how to pronounce it.)
I spent my teen years in Tewksbury ("Tooks-Bree" or "Twooks-bree" or "Twooks-bur-ee") Massachusetts , next door to Chelmsford ("Chems-fid") and Billerica ("Bricka" or "Buh-ricka") not too far of is Peabody ("Pee-biddy") . A lot of the towns used to have their own accents but they've been dying off in recent years, it used to be possible to tell roughly where someone was from with a high degree of accuracy as folks from cambridge, charlestown, the south end and sommerville all sounded different (all within a few miles of each other).
Never had much trouble with dr who accents myself, the occasional slang might slip past me but generally i'm okay.
In the Western Hemisphere, we've got lots and lots of Native American names to deal with. There are tons of them near me. People tend to boggle when they see Hauppague on a road sign, for instance. (The pronunciation of that one depends on how Lawn Guylandish your accent is…)
TheRedPriest wrote:With the latest incarnation of Dr Who, the posh accent of the older series is noticeably lacking. I find nearly a quarter of the dialogue of the principals incomprehensible.
This is fundamental to British culture.
Some of us live in counties called things like "Hertfordshire" (pronounced "HART-ford-shire") or "Leicestershire" (pronounced "LES-ter-shire") and towns called things like "Worcester" (pronounced "WOOS-ter"),
Heh, I live about 1 hour away from Worcester, Massachusetts. It's pronounced the exact same odd way as the original, which confuses tourists.
After all, there is a lot of variation of accents in Great Britain itself.
