CringeFest 7: I don't have an accent

Damian in Edinburgh   Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:45 am GMT
Matt - are you sure you don't have an accent? You have Surrey - Englefield Green or Virginia Water or Sunningdale written all over you!

Maybe Surbiton at a push........

I can detect it from all the way up here! ;-)
Guest   Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:48 am GMT
-it will be noticed that the area is the only cot/caught unmerged spot on the West Coast.-

You cannot say SF is unmerged.
Only older speakers are umerged. All younger speakers are merged (and some, epecially middle class females, even CVShifted)
Uriel   Fri Aug 22, 2008 2:46 am GMT
Like, ew my gawd!

(Sorry, every time I read about the California vowel shift, Moon Unit Zappa runs through my head.)
Guest   Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:09 pm GMT
Guest wrote:
"So it's totally freaking [cringe] possible to talk WITHOUT AN accent even in another language that's _ different TO your own language of your own country."

You're seriously claiming that "different from" is wrong, and "different to" is correct?

Jasper wrote:
"Apropos my previous post, I found a cot/caught merger map. My GA sample from SanFran/Sacramento was cot/caught unmerged; it will be noticed that the area is the only cot/caught unmerged spot on the West Coast."

SF/Sacramento isn't an area, it's a region. The distance between the two cities is 121 km. That's more than half the distance between London and Paris.
boz   Sat Aug 30, 2008 8:51 pm GMT
<<The distance between the two cities is 121 km. That's more than half the distance between London and Paris.>>

Not quite. The straight line flight distance between London and Paris is 350 km, and that's not even the actual driving distance. 121 km hardly even gets you to Dover from London.
Guest   Sun Aug 31, 2008 5:54 am GMT
-"Another misconception is that Standard English is spoken in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit or Cleveland. This is also not true. The dialect spoken in those citiies is called "Inland North" and if you have ever watched the Saturday Night Live skit..."

The most amusing thing is that people from those areas really don't THINK they have an accent. (It's a running joke in these parts). No matter what they think, the accent is distinctive enough to be parodied; Saturday Night Live used to feature Rosanne Rosanna Dana, and who could forget the character MARGE in the movie FARGO?-



Well, Katie Holmes is from Toledo, and she uses her NCVShifted accent when she acts, obviously Hollywood accent coaches don't find NCVS worth ''correcting''. One more thing, wouldn't be easier to hire an actress/actor from this area for GreatLakes based stories? Meg Ryan needed to put on a Detroit accent for ''Against the Ropes''? Katie Holmes or Kathy Griffin could have been a better choice.
Jasper   Sun Aug 31, 2008 5:57 am GMT
"SF/Sacramento isn't an area, it's a region. The distance between the two cities is 121 km. That's more than half the distance between London and Paris."

She was from a little town half-way between the two cities.

As for 121 km being a long way? Hah! You must be from Europe. 121 km (about 70 miles) is NOTHING here in the US, where, in the West, you can literally drive 100s of kilometers without seeing a single house.

This reminds me of the old adage: Europeans think 200 miles is a long way; Americans think 200 years is a long time...
Guest   Sun Aug 31, 2008 8:16 am GMT
-Europeans think 200 miles is a long way-

We don't use miles but km.
Jasper   Sun Aug 31, 2008 4:37 pm GMT
<chuckle> You're right.

The old adage originally read: "Englishman think 200 miles is a long way; Americans...."; that was in the days before the UK went metric.

There is still merit in the old saw, though. 200 miles translates to 321 kilometers; this distance is not very far at all in the United States, but Englishman---and their European counterparts--think it is. That notion makes us chuckle, because a non-stop flight from New York to Los Angeles takes over six hours; if I want to drive from Reno to Las Vegas, it would take me eight solid hours of driving to get there--and these two cities are in the same state. (The second part of the adage is true, too--the single oldest building in Reno was built in 1864, which seems like a long time ago to us.)

In linguistic terms, American English doesn't change as rapidly as, say, German does in Germany, where you can travel just a few kilometers and hear a completely different, unintelligible dialect. Rather, dialects in the US change very gradually; oftentimes--especially in the West--one must travel a long way to hear even minor differences...
Jasper   Sun Aug 31, 2008 5:00 pm GMT
[Well, Katie Holmes is from Toledo, and she uses her NCVShifted accent when she acts, obviously Hollywood accent coaches don't find NCVS worth ''correcting''. One more thing, wouldn't be easier to hire an actress/actor from this area for GreatLakes based stories? Meg Ryan needed to put on a Detroit accent for ''Against the Ropes''? Katie Holmes or Kathy Griffin could have been a better choice.]

Apropos the first point, that does generally seem to be the truth--I don't know why. I have noticed more recently, however, that the dialect difference is beginning to be written into story lines. For example, when Dennis Farina joined Law & Order, he was introduced as being a detective from Chicago. Speaking in his natural Chicago dialect, this was a completely believable plot device.

As for the second point, you have a good question. Perhaps these actresses were just wrong for the parts. For example, I'm not sure who could have done a better job than Frances MacDormand for the part of Marge, although admittedly she did turn on the accent just a little bit too much, even for a parody.
Brit   Sun Aug 31, 2008 8:09 pm GMT
Hey! when did we stop using "miles" as a measurement here in UK?. I thought we we're still using the official British mish-mash measurement system.
igodi   Sun Aug 31, 2008 9:00 pm GMT
Was really so many "Canadians who [wrongly] insist that they have no accent"? I'm Canadian and I've yet meet another Canadian who has said s/he has no accent.

By the way, original poster, I don't cringe but I do agree it's common ignorance when anybody claims they don't have an accent. I also think it's common idiocy when that claim makes someone want to utter, "It just makes me want to die?"


OT: Lol with always typing "I hate spam". It makes for an interesting way to hypnotize would be spammers into resisting spamming.
Guest   Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:56 pm GMT
-I'm Canadian and I've yet meet another Canadian who has said s/he has no accent. -

Newscasters Newfoundland English is the least accented Canadian network English accent. It's similar to conservative Californian accent, the low back merged vowel is still LOW (and not raised) and still unrounded (even in words like DOLL, DOLLAR)...
Damian in Edinburgh   Sun Aug 31, 2008 11:01 pm GMT
***I thought we we're still using the official British mish-mash measurement system***

We're still using it......mish mash style. Everything official measurement, no matter what it is, be it your height, your weight, the distances from Dover to Dunstable or from Auchtermuchty to Aberdeen are in metric. Every official document quoting measurements of any kind does so in metric form.

I go down the gym a several times a week - my height is cms and my weight is kgs on all the forms and charts and I abide by those as I was taught entirely in metric at school - old fashioned imperials had been kicked into touch in Scotland before I reached secondary education.

However, many people convert to old imperials on an informal basis - down the gym your chart says you are so many cms tall and you weigh so many kgs but then many people work out how much that is in the old fashioned measures even now. It's exactly the same in reverse when you go to your doctor or into hospital - all their records are metric, and they have to convert when patients give their stats to them in the old imperial measures.

Kilometres are used for distances in all offical documenation, and by the vast majority of organisations except for the motor trade as cars are still sold in the UK with gauges in mileage form; road signs are still in miles and speed limits in mph as a special concession by the EU to the UK due to public pressure here .......for the time being anyway.

We buy our petrol (gasoline) by the litre but down the pub we buy our ale in pints and the door to door milkman delivers his milk the same way..in pint bottles, again after protests from the public resistant to any changes there.....all down to tradition.

Yet in the supermarkets and in all stores everything is sold in metric form without exception. Buying a pound of butter is positively Dickensian, as is a pint of milk - it's totally metric down at Tesco or Sainsburys or Morrisons or Asda or Waitrose or Marks and Spencer or wherever.....even the street market stallholders now have to sell their goods in metric or face prosecution, or at the very least show the £/p per kg price very prominently, with the choice to show the £ per lb equivalent in brackets underneath to meet EU regulations.

It's time the UK did away with any remaining imperials now, right across the board - they now belong to a past era and not only look quaint but are very cumbersome in many cases. It's ridiculous to have two mindsets in many cases - and stupid instant conversions just to suit the convenience of conservative old diehards is a complete waste of time which serves no useful purpose at all. Probably replacing mileage signs on Britain's roads will be the very last changeover I suppose - maybe when all the old fogeys have all died off! ;-)

Many larger stores, such as Marks and Spencer, already have facilities for people to pay either in UK £ Sterling or the € of the European Union. As the € is easily the world's strongest currency it's time we in the UK ditched the quid and took up with the € toute suite. It will have to happen someday fairly soon, it's inevitable.
Guest   Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:51 am GMT
>> It's time the UK did away with any remaining imperials now, right across the board - they now belong to a past era and not only look quaint but are very cumbersome in many cases. It's ridiculous to have two mindsets in many cases <<

Well, it's much worse in the US, where the old system is still in great use, but the metric system is making inroads into certain areas--many products now list their net weight in the odd metric units, and drinks are sold in liters. So, yeah, it's much worse for us here, especially since we tend to be a lot less familiar with the metric system than other English-speaking countries, which have gone metric to a greater extent. People here don't even want to go metric.