Where is this speaker from?
>You may be more accustomed to hearing it pronounced with the 'a' sound in the word 'bad' as opposed to the 'a' sound in the word 'cape'. [Rom]
Yes, in my own pronunciation it's not anywhere near the 'a' sound in 'cape'. Also my 'a' in 'bag' seems to be a bit lower and farther back than the 'a' in the following Merriam-Webster recording (though I perceive the recorded word clearly as 'bag'):
http://cougar.eb.com/sound/b/bag00001.wav
Found at Merriam-Webster:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=bag
>>He doesn't sound Californian to me, or West Coast for that matter.<<
It sounds exactly like I speak and I live in Northern Oregon, so what makes you think it doesn't sound West Coast?
Sorry, my last post was not explained at all because I wrote out a quite long analysis of the speech, but the internet shut down, so when I got it back up I was quite mad at it so I typed out my one-phrase answer. : )
Basically it originally said that, although the o's sounded quite Canadian (and there was some funky vowel raising there), it sounded oddly similar to John Kerry's accent from his younger military years. Hence, I figure it's whatever accent he had, but it could be Canadian also.
I got that northern vibe, too, but that's such a vague description, and I don't know enough Canadians to make a good comparison.
And of course, not all New Englanders have that heavy accent.
<<It sounds exactly like I speak and I live in Northern Oregon, so what makes you think it doesn't sound West Coast?>>
It's the overall impression I get. The vowels and intonation don't sound like what I've heard from people on the West Coast (and I'm from California). True, the differences I'm noticing may be minute or not so noticeable to the untrained ear, but that's just what I noticed. However, as I said before I'm not gonna guess where he's from because I don't think reading voices are necessarily a good indicator of accent because people tend to speak differently when reading than when speaking naturally in everyday conversation with others.
>>Basically it originally said that, although the o's sounded quite Canadian (and there was some funky vowel raising there), it sounded oddly similar to John Kerry's accent from his younger military years. Hence, I figure it's whatever accent he had, but it could be Canadian also.<<
How do Canadian o's sound?
What kind of 'funky' vowel raising did you hear?
I think I read that John Kerry grew up in Massachusetts.
OK, I finally got to listen to it. I'm thinking the accent is Canadian.
I also think he's from Canada. His ASK is more on the [ask] side instead of [aesk]..
I'm sorry (again) for being short and, as you've all pointed out, vague.
Ok, here's my own (untrained) analysis:
'call' /kO:l/, 'Bob' /bO:b/
'bags' /be:Gs/
very nasal...
I'm terrible at exactly figuring out why something sounds the way it does, so I can't say why it is, but the more I listen to the recording, the more I'm convinced he's not Canadian. One thing about 'ask' is that he's not saying /ask/, he's saying /~{sk/, which is just a nasalised /{sk/, which is the main thing that makes me think he sounds oddly similar to John Kerry in his twenties. Listen to this:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/old/dn20040220.ra&start=5:15. Maybe it's just that they have similar voices, but the accent is quite similar, also. So, I don't think the guy in the recording's Canadian, but he's definitely from that area of North America...so...yeah...
Yes, he does seem to have a similar voice as John Kerry did.
I was thinking Canadian because of the way he pronounced the "a" in "bags"; that's not found in Boston. But thanks for the Kerry clip; I'm going to put a link to it on my site (http://students.csci.unt.edu/~kun) as an example of a Boston Brahmin accent.
Since I have some time I'm going to check out the male Canadian and Bostonian samples on that Speech Accent Archive site and see if any of them is the same one we've been listening to.
Alright, I just listened to all the male Canadians and Bostonians, as well as one from Torrington, CT. None of them are the sample we've been listening to.
Although this sample uses the same text that the samples on that site used, this sample is not on that website.
I just went through ALL the North American male samples on that site, and none of them were our sample either. Where did this come from?