Today: Accents 1&2; My Stammering World; Modern English & French; Newfoundland Regiment @ ANZAC Cove
I've got what people refer to as 'batshit crazy accent'. I tend to stick 'yo' on the end of this statement, because I believe it sounds cooler. Anything sounds cooler if you stick a 'yo' onto the end of it, unless the word is 'yo-yo', in which case you just sound like a very lazy rapper.
The actual truth of the matter is that I'm expending a lot of energy controlling a pretty severe stammer, and the accent gets all juggled around because I'm controlling my breathing, pitch, pausing, and exact grammar-usage, or waving my hands about within my line of sight as a distraction technique (or as I like to think of it, pointing out in the air where the pitch of this word would like to be and trying to follow it) in an effort to trick my brain into saying 'oh we can say this word just FINE, thanks for asking, look at me, no going tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh at all!'
Or sometimes, it's a sentence of 'look at me, failing to speak'. That is often a sign of needing to have another cup of coffee. The reason I'm not the best conversationalist before I've gotten something hot and preferably caffeinated into me is because we'll probably end up having an entire conversation in vague sign. Which is not so say 'I can do Sign', it's to say the scooping and vague stirring motion is me looking for where you've hidden the coffee and sugar, and the pouring motion means milk, and the pinching-fingers motion means 'have you hidden my antihistamines, I can smell the pine trees pollening from here'. This may be accompanied by abbreviated statements like 'where's the- [sign movement]', or repeated requests for the 'thingie'.
That second is sometimes called word-swapping, and is a version of stammering in itself. Like saying 'escape' for 'leave'. Or going 'where's the umlalalallalalala-thing'.
Fortunately, most of this can be worked out from context.
Bizarrely, it's fine and dandy if I'm reading off a piece of paper, or giving a speech to a fuckton of people (though I'll. Or singing (actually, not stammering while singing is apparently fairly common). So I get quite a bit of luck there, as most people with the stammering issues just plain cannot do the public speaking bit, bit of paper in hand or not (I use a 3rd gen iPod Nano, the cute little squat ones which fit EXACTLY in the palm of one's hand).
On the other hand, sometimes at the end of a sentence I'll take a few deep breaths. This usually means it's been a very hard sentence to get through (there's likely to be pausing or switched words if that happened), or I'm trying to control the need to start going tuhtuthtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh at the start of the next sentence, or the tuhtuhtuhing has already happened, but I plowed right on through and managed the rest of the sentence pretty well (this is quite hard. Once a sentence gets started on the path to losing, it's damn difficult to get the reins back).
ANYWAY. Back to accents.
One should never trust them.
Most people would listen to me and then declare 'British!' or American, Swedish, South-African, Dutch, Norwegian, the moon, Australia, etc.
Listening to most Canadians, people tend to mistake them for Americans. It doesn't help when Canadians are pretending to be Americans, Americans Canadians, or Toronto is pretending to be any major city in America (I didn't know LA had a CN Tower!).
But unless the Americans are from pretty darn close to the border (but not New York, which is both surprisingly close to the border and a total haven for some pretty damn awesome accents), Americans sound nothing like Canadians. It's like saying modern Parisian French sounds like Quebecbois. It doesn't, for precisely the same reason that American English sounds like British English.
British English is technically Modern English - a more evolved form. And by evolved I mean 'stole more shit from the French and any other language it could get its hands on', including spelling; hence 'colour' with a u, and so forth (common to most currently-Commonwealth countries including Canada, though you're likely to be marked down for it in the Canadian school system). People who say that Americans should learn to speak the Queen's English are saying that they should quit talking like Medieval Brits. A good Shakespeare performance by a really good group of Americans would sound fairly damn close to what the original performance would have sounded like. Certainly a lot closer to it than Hamlet with David Tennant & Patrick Stewart (I'm not saying they didn't do a great job. I'm saying it was a cast of native-modern-English-speaking-actors).
Quebecbois and Arcadian is essentially Medieval French. Or at least, Medieval French if somebody started making some words into something approximating a modern English. Which is how we get words like 'lunc' (like 'hunk' but with an l) for 'lunch'. Possibly making it more modern, or more perhaps more evolutionary, than Parisian French. It's adopted the quite English manner of stealing things and pretending it was there all along, whereas Parisian French usually refuses to use an English noun if something was invented in America or Britain or somewhere, so needs to sometimes invent new words like 'Ordinateur' for computer, in the same way that a group of Latin scholars sometimes go of and invent the word 'Computator' and pretend it's a real Latin word meaning computer (they mostly do this for shits & giggles, and because there's some radio broadcasts which like to speak Ancient Latin but be modern about it).
One wonders what the French (or indeed, Latin) for 'hovercraft' is, a machine officially made in New Zealand.
People from Newfoundland, on the other hand, do tend to sound suspiciously like some New Zealanders.
Newfoundland and Labrador only became a part of Canada fairly recently. Until then, they were their own darn places, and Newfoundland technically counted as ANZACs. Which is half of the reason you may come across Newfies talking about a party on the 25th of April. The more you know.
Another example might be my sister. Who is very definitely a New Zealander (and only recently Australian). She can acquire a new accent within a week of being in a country, which would make her an excellent spy. This first week is often characterised by the occasional slip between two (or three) accents; a 'punk sleep' is a pink slip - a detention sheet - in first Niw Zild then Strine (New Zealand and Australian English). At the moment, she chooses to speak with a Canadian accent, except her 'O's are definitely Australian. She doesn't say soorree unless she's taking the mickey.
So, to summarise the original point of this ramble before it started going off on several different tangents.
Accents. And words. Don't trust 'em. Especially if you're speaking Latin. Or trying to say that your hovercraft is full of eels.
The actual truth of the matter is that I'm expending a lot of energy controlling a pretty severe stammer, and the accent gets all juggled around because I'm controlling my breathing, pitch, pausing, and exact grammar-usage, or waving my hands about within my line of sight as a distraction technique (or as I like to think of it, pointing out in the air where the pitch of this word would like to be and trying to follow it) in an effort to trick my brain into saying 'oh we can say this word just FINE, thanks for asking, look at me, no going tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh at all!'
Or sometimes, it's a sentence of 'look at me, failing to speak'. That is often a sign of needing to have another cup of coffee. The reason I'm not the best conversationalist before I've gotten something hot and preferably caffeinated into me is because we'll probably end up having an entire conversation in vague sign. Which is not so say 'I can do Sign', it's to say the scooping and vague stirring motion is me looking for where you've hidden the coffee and sugar, and the pouring motion means milk, and the pinching-fingers motion means 'have you hidden my antihistamines, I can smell the pine trees pollening from here'. This may be accompanied by abbreviated statements like 'where's the- [sign movement]', or repeated requests for the 'thingie'.
That second is sometimes called word-swapping, and is a version of stammering in itself. Like saying 'escape' for 'leave'. Or going 'where's the umlalalallalalala-thing'.
Fortunately, most of this can be worked out from context.
Bizarrely, it's fine and dandy if I'm reading off a piece of paper, or giving a speech to a fuckton of people (though I'll. Or singing (actually, not stammering while singing is apparently fairly common). So I get quite a bit of luck there, as most people with the stammering issues just plain cannot do the public speaking bit, bit of paper in hand or not (I use a 3rd gen iPod Nano, the cute little squat ones which fit EXACTLY in the palm of one's hand).
On the other hand, sometimes at the end of a sentence I'll take a few deep breaths. This usually means it's been a very hard sentence to get through (there's likely to be pausing or switched words if that happened), or I'm trying to control the need to start going tuhtuthtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh at the start of the next sentence, or the tuhtuhtuhing has already happened, but I plowed right on through and managed the rest of the sentence pretty well (this is quite hard. Once a sentence gets started on the path to losing, it's damn difficult to get the reins back).
ANYWAY. Back to accents.
One should never trust them.
Most people would listen to me and then declare 'British!' or American, Swedish, South-African, Dutch, Norwegian, the moon, Australia, etc.
Listening to most Canadians, people tend to mistake them for Americans. It doesn't help when Canadians are pretending to be Americans, Americans Canadians, or Toronto is pretending to be any major city in America (I didn't know LA had a CN Tower!).
But unless the Americans are from pretty darn close to the border (but not New York, which is both surprisingly close to the border and a total haven for some pretty damn awesome accents), Americans sound nothing like Canadians. It's like saying modern Parisian French sounds like Quebecbois. It doesn't, for precisely the same reason that American English sounds like British English.
British English is technically Modern English - a more evolved form. And by evolved I mean 'stole more shit from the French and any other language it could get its hands on', including spelling; hence 'colour' with a u, and so forth (common to most currently-Commonwealth countries including Canada, though you're likely to be marked down for it in the Canadian school system). People who say that Americans should learn to speak the Queen's English are saying that they should quit talking like Medieval Brits. A good Shakespeare performance by a really good group of Americans would sound fairly damn close to what the original performance would have sounded like. Certainly a lot closer to it than Hamlet with David Tennant & Patrick Stewart (I'm not saying they didn't do a great job. I'm saying it was a cast of native-modern-English-speaking-actors).
Quebecbois and Arcadian is essentially Medieval French. Or at least, Medieval French if somebody started making some words into something approximating a modern English. Which is how we get words like 'lunc' (like 'hunk' but with an l) for 'lunch'. Possibly making it more modern, or more perhaps more evolutionary, than Parisian French. It's adopted the quite English manner of stealing things and pretending it was there all along, whereas Parisian French usually refuses to use an English noun if something was invented in America or Britain or somewhere, so needs to sometimes invent new words like 'Ordinateur' for computer, in the same way that a group of Latin scholars sometimes go of and invent the word 'Computator' and pretend it's a real Latin word meaning computer (they mostly do this for shits & giggles, and because there's some radio broadcasts which like to speak Ancient Latin but be modern about it).
One wonders what the French (or indeed, Latin) for 'hovercraft' is, a machine officially made in New Zealand.
People from Newfoundland, on the other hand, do tend to sound suspiciously like some New Zealanders.
Newfoundland and Labrador only became a part of Canada fairly recently. Until then, they were their own darn places, and Newfoundland technically counted as ANZACs. Which is half of the reason you may come across Newfies talking about a party on the 25th of April. The more you know.
Another example might be my sister. Who is very definitely a New Zealander (and only recently Australian). She can acquire a new accent within a week of being in a country, which would make her an excellent spy. This first week is often characterised by the occasional slip between two (or three) accents; a 'punk sleep' is a pink slip - a detention sheet - in first Niw Zild then Strine (New Zealand and Australian English). At the moment, she chooses to speak with a Canadian accent, except her 'O's are definitely Australian. She doesn't say soorree unless she's taking the mickey.
So, to summarise the original point of this ramble before it started going off on several different tangents.
Accents. And words. Don't trust 'em. Especially if you're speaking Latin. Or trying to say that your hovercraft is full of eels.