My Accent

I am talking about the Old Trafford /Manchester United link, the one featuring the fantastico Christiano Ronaldo, and the ONLY link I can click on apart from the others below the main one which to my mind don't apply, then the guy speaking - the MU manager I think he said he was - (forgive me - I know next to zilch about English football but I sure as hell know about Ronaldo) - then the accent definitely sounds Mancunian to me...it has to be if it's the team manager.

I have been to Manchester several times - it's only an hour by train from Leeds where I was at uni. I recognised the Mancunian speak all around me, mixed in with all the others I heard, Manchester being just as cosmopolitan as any other UK big city.

As for Devon (and especially Plymouth and Exeter) and also Cornwall, I have been to both counties and both cities named. I could not find any accent in the above link which even remotely resembling any West Country accent (the term West Country in England covering the whole of Devon and Cornwall, as well as Somerset and Dorset, and at a pinch - Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

I am not normally dim or slow on the uptake but I am nursing just a wee bit of a post Burns Night "head" and feel a tad "fragile", Mr Me. Could you perhaps tenderly guide me by the hand to the correct link in which I could hear your voice and not that of the Manchester United head honcho? Then I would be able to offer an opinion.

Please. And, as you tell us that you are not a native English speaker: Por favor. Per favore. S'il vous plait. Bitte. Or whatever.....

I have no idea where you can find that Mancunian link. :-) I checked it out out again and there is no such thing as that there.

It is the link: http://www.ziddu.com/download/3259580/V007.WAV.html

Just click on it and the file name and extension V007.WAV appears on the website. Then click on download instead of play. The play option doesn't work for me at all. It might work for you, though, or it can possibly be the Mancunian video. I don't know, I haven' seen it.

I hope it works.

You're evidently clicking on an advertisement Damian.
Liz's accent was most definately Southern English or Cornish. Most probably on the border between the two. Either Plymouth of Saltash.

Having listened, I can't see anything I'd consider as a south western accent there whatsoever. It is, for the most part, quite a conservative variety of RP.

It does, for the most part sound like RP but there are twinges of the SW accent in the R's and O's... Like a posh person who's spent a number of years down here.
My ex-girlfriend's Mum sounded almost exactly the same. She had a posh accent with the slight hints of Cornish/SW English just touching the vowels and R's.
It's only a very delicate hint but it's most definately there.

I am much more alert now even though I have only just got in and it's half an hour past midnight and I have to be up by 06:00hrs but hey ho....yes I did hazily click on the MU manager instead of on where I should have*.

I listened to the correct voice and pondered.....firstly, as a Scot I have to confirm that it is English. Secondly - definitely Southern English - that is, below a line drawn from the Welsh border, through Birmingham and Coventry and then to the Wash....south of that line. However, that means a pretty large chunk of England to consider, including London of course, but I think we can discount London....it's not a London accent of the RP variety, so that's out in my reckoning.

I think we can pretty much say the same for the rest of South East England outside of London, and also East Anglia can be ruled out, too. It doesn't quite have the East Anglian touch to it - you know the sort of thing - Essex girl - certainly not - no way! Norfolk and Suffolk? Nope. Cambridgeshire? Bedfordshire? Nope.

Let's move westwards then - out beyond Reading and the Thames Valley.

Oxford? Maybe, just maybe.....there could be a slight ring of the Isis to it....but no, I think we need to go on on further south westwards.....down into Somerset....she sounded like many of the people I heard while pootling around Glastonbury and Wells with my mate as we were on our way down to Cornwall - Wells - where they shot "Hot Fuzz"....you can hear some similar accents in that very film.

I don't think we need go any further - not really down beyond Taunton and Exeter and then skirting south of Bodmin Moor all the way down to Plymouth and then over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall at Saltash.

I think I've cracked it......it's Somerset - and the wee city of Wells in particular. That's what it is - it's Wells! Lovely little Wells, and it's "Hot Fuzz" what did it! ;-)

Is there a prize on offer?

*should have......it's amazing how many people write "should of" instead of "should have" - as in "I should of proofread my posting"......just check out some of the posts in Forums to see what I mean......I'm speaking about UK forums now - I'm not sure if this is a common mistake anywhere else where people use English.

Anyway, I'm off to my hammock now......another working week starts in just over seven hours. Good night from Bonnie Scotland.

<<I don't think we need go any further - not really down beyond Taunton and Exeter and then skirting south of Bodmin Moor all the way down to Plymouth and then over the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall at Saltash.>>

Just one little thing... Bodmin moor is beloe Plymouth and in Cornwall.
I think you meant Exmoor or Dartmoor.
But nice rolling commentary on your thought process there Damian =)

*below, obviously!
How cretinous of me!

Jago - you are dead right.....I DID mean Dartmoor, honestly I did! It's just that I had Bodmin Moor in my mind as I so loved the view from the top of that around the famous Jamaica Inn area, well known to those who appreciate the Daphne du Maurier novels.....from memory of when my mate and I were down there I think you can see the sea on both sides of the Cornish peninsula from the nearthe top of Bodmin Moor....isn't it called by the wonderful name of Brown Willy? I'd love to know how it got that name....it makes the imagination run riot.

Perhaps "willy" doesn't mean the same in the rest of the English speaking world as it does here in the UK.

It is lovely. I'm lucky that I actualy live on Bodmin moor and can actualy see Brown Willy from my window.
The name comes from the original Cornish language name "Bron Wennyly", which means 'hill of the swallows'.
A few Cornish names were changed when the English came over to record information for the Domesday book. The general concensus was that some of the Cornish language names were hard to pronounce and so they had two names. One for the English, one for the Cornish.

Thanks for that info, Jago.

Thanks also for that wee bit of Cornish Language info on the origins of Brown Willy.....we saw it rise upwards on the skyline as we bombed along the A38 heading down to St Ives, and as we were free to do what the hell we liked with our time we stopped off here and there and everywhere along the way. My mate and I are great map readers, and took it in turn while the other did the driving all the way down from Edinburgh, staying one night at some great little inn in a wee village in the Cotswolds - Stow-on-the Wold.

"Bron Wennyly" - "the Hill of the Swallows"...how very similar Cornish is to Welsh, as we know. "Bron" and also the closely linked "Bryn" are, as you may or may not know, the Welsh Language equivalent for a hill, and the Welsh for the swallow is "Yr Wennol". Similarly "traeth", for beach, is identical in both of the ancient Celtic Languages, and "eglos" (C) and "eglwys" (W) almost the same, and that's just a couple of such similarities.

I loved Cornwall - we had a fantastic time down there - I hope to go again sometime, but it's about as far in England as it's possible to get from up here, without ending up in the Scilly Isles, which can be reached by helicopter from Penzance, as we saw. We may give that a whirl next time round, and as my mate now works down in Winchester, in Hampshire, it'll be a much shorter journey for him.

The similarities are interesting. Since learning Cornish two years ago and using it in practical situations most days I must say that you do notice large connections with both Welsh and Breton.
Great map readers you may be but the beauty of Winter is that all the tourists have gone home and are actualy missing the most stunning time to be here. In the summer the worst beaches are taken, leaving us to go to those beaches that the tourists don't know about =p.
Let me know when your next down and I'll tell you about places like Pednvounder and Boobies bay.
I'd be carefull calling it England though. you won't get a great response to that from many Cornish people!

I will hold you to all that, Jago!

I know how sensitive many Cornish people are about the issue of a separate Cornish identity as opposed to the rest of England, and that the River Tamar doesn't just separate two counties (at least for part of the border between Cornwall and Devon) but two culturally different countries - Cornwall and England!

While we were down there we met this man in a pub who was the head of a village primary school near Truro (that in itself is pretty unusual seeing that the vast majority of such beings are women) and he told us that when he took a party of his pupils on a day trip by coach to somewhere in Devon - he did tell us where but I don't remember the name of the place - and when they had crossed over the Tamar Bridge from Saltash and into Devon one young lad said to him: "Are we in England now, sir?"

The next time I drive across the Tamar Bridge and see that big "Welcome to Cornwall" sign I really will feel as if I have left England behind me.

Cornwall looks physically different - that's quite plain as soon as you have driven just a few miles into the county - it's very similar to parts of Scotland (another part of the Celtic fringe) and also many parts of Wales (yet again - the Celtic fringe) and especially to Anglesey, in North West Wales, where another good friend of mine from uni days lives and who is 100% Welsh speaking, and it's from him entirely that I have acquired the smidgeon of knowledge I now have about the Welsh Language, and how I come to recognise the similarities between Welsh and Cornish place names, and also certain words in both Languages as I indicated in my earlier post.

Apparently I didn't quite get the definite article for the swallow quite right - the swallow (as in the summer bird visitor) is "y wennol" - not "yr) as I said. It's all quite confusing in Welsh as "yr" is uswd when the word begins with a vowel - a bit like the use of "a" or "an" in the English indefinite article.

The Welsh "y" when it means "the" is pronounced as "uh" in English, but not always in other words and place names. Take the name of the Welsh university and seaside town of Aberystwyth for instance. Apparently the first "y" is pronounced as an English "uh" but the second is the same as the "i" in the English "with". No wonder most Anglo Saxons make such a dog's dinner of Welsh placenames - either unintenionally or, very often, by deliberate design - the English in particular regard it as some kind of joke when they do this - they do the same with our Scottish place names which have our local Gaelic origins.

Congratulations on learning Cornish - good for you. How much encouragement is given to residents to learn the Language? Maybe one day it will receive the same status as Welsh does in Wales, where I believe it is compulsory in all State schools up to a certain age group. I will check this out again with my mate in Sir Fon (Anglesey)!

You certainly have a fantastic choice of beaches in little coves away from the main holiday spots but it must be difficult finding a quiet, secluded one "in season" - with no "emmets" cluttering them up!