Great advice not just for speakers but also for writers.
The Captain
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So, any highlights/takeaways from the 23 minute video?
DB2
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All good stuff. It explains why I don’t understand half of the talk in English movies. It also covers some of the writing techniques I have learned over the years. Watch it to become a better communicator. It’s not what you say that counts, it’s what your audience hears and understands.
Churchill, echoing George Bernard Shaw, said it best, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”
Enjoy!
The Captain
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Well, if Winston did but know it, England itself is a country separated by a common language.
You don’t have to stray too far from place of origin (geographic and social) to be identified by accent, word and idiom usage etc…and have a pretty hard time fathoming what t’other tribe is on about.
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True dat. There used to be people at county fairs and such who would (like guess your weight) try to identify where you grew up after hearing you talk for a minute or two. And they were so often right it was amazing.
I thought the spread of “midwestern news anchor TV” would stamp out much of regional dialect, but I live in Tennessee and I will testify that it hasn’t.
I can see how Latin transmogrified into Spanish, Italian, and French over several hundreds of years, especially given the isolation of those geographies once Roman rule collapsed. Little by little those changes creep into the language, and a couple hundred years later, absent some unifying force, presto: nobody can understand a thing you say.
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I like that he said it comes down to respect. So true about so much.
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There are indeed those who try to guess where you are from by your accent–especially in the South.
We also have local pronunciations of place names. They are a dead giveaway of outsiders. “Hey sonny. You’re not from around here, are you?”
English is my 4th language (Hungarian – now forgotten, German, Spanish, English). One person recognized that I learned English in Canada.
The Captain
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Wonderfully, here in Mexico I get my HIV care at an excellent public clinic in the medium big city of Celaya, about an 80 minute drive from my home in tiny ancient sacred Atotonilco in central Mexico.
Standing in an early morning line of about 50 people this morning for my quarterly blood draw, I was casually chatting with a 25ish guy (yeah, he was quite cute), and out of the blue he guessed “Aprendiste español en, pues, El Paso?” [You learned Spanish in, oh, El Paso?]
That was exactly correct. I started to talk outside my family while I lived in Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas, from 1953-1955, and absorbed both Mexican Spanish and English. The habitual local dialect there (“Norteño”) stuck through my time livng most of my life in a bilingual Los Angeles neighborhood (a very different far more mixed up dialect than old El Paso) and much later while living in Barcelona and then Mallorca, Spain.
It’s like I was fingerprinted at birth.
d fb
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My dad’s family immigrated from Quebec. They always spoke French at home, in New Jersey. He took the grand, free, tour of northern France in 1944-45. He could make himself understood by the locals, without difficulty. But, in the back of my mind is the thought that, after dad turned and walked away, the locals said “good grief, that guy talks like a hillbilly, craziest accent I ever heard”
Steve
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I got some tutoring in French in Caracas before going to school in Canada. On a Xmas tour to Quebec I could not understand them. I met a girl who translated between Canuck French and French French.
The Captain
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Dad and I went to Expo 67 in Montreal. One day, he went to the French information booth, with a question. He came back and said “she speaks Parisian French”, ie not a local girl.
To better exercise his French, on the way to Montreal, he drove up through Ottawa and into Quebec, then down a little two lane rural highway into the city. Along the way, he stopped at a little gas station in the boonies to fill up. In those days, Sunoco had multiple grades of gas, designated by different numbers: 200,210,220,230 and so on. When he pulled in to the gas station, the pump jockey circled around behind the car, saw the Michigan license plate, and rolled out his entire store of English “200, 210?” Dad got out of the car and chatted with the guy while the tank filled. I have an image of the guy walking back into the gas station, someone saying to him “that yank speaks French?”, and pump jockey said “yeah, not school French either. he has a Gaspe accent”.
Like the rest of Québec, the official language in Gaspésie is French (though there are also several English-speaking communities in this region). However, because the Gaspé Peninsula is made up of a rich cultural mosaic, the accents of the locals change from village to village. You can hear Mi’kmaq, European French, British, Jersey Island, Scottish, Irish, Acadian and other influences in the French spoken here! And if you do speak French, we guarantee that you’ll hear a few expressions that you’ve never heard anywhere else!
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Some years ago, Tim mentioned his new doctor was a Newfie. I asked if he could understand anything she said.
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A few weeks ago, I was at a car show, and spied this Japanese domestic market Nissan. I asked the owner what she did for parts. She said some are the same as in a Micra (which was sold in Canada) but she needs to go to Japan for many parts.
I said “do you speak Japanese”
She spooled out a string of Japanese.
I said “Wakarimasen”
She lit up, and spooled out another string of Japanese.
I confessed I only had picked up a couple phrases, phonetically, from watching “Shogun” on TV decades ago.
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