Re: Help needed with expletives

Zeborah wrote:

Will in New Haven <bill.reich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 24, 10:13 am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:56:12 +1000, "James A. Donald"
<jam...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:rsa014tmu7tdr0c40o47sgft2htdtits80@xxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

In my reality, all english dialects are becoming more
similar,

I've suspected for years that you live in a different world;
now I know it.

I know that there is some kind of long-standing issue between you
two but the English language on the planet I live on is behaving
very much as Mr. Donald describes.

New Zealand English isn't. If, for example, watching American TV
caused me to change my speech towards American English, then I would
not have been reduced to tears in a New York railway station when my
pronunciation of the letters "A" and "E" was misunderstood by a
telephone operator who as a result told me there was no such person in
the phone book.

Ten years later, a panel of judges in a spelling bee in America, even
aware that the New Zealand contestant pronounced letters differently
from them, even asking her to repeat what she'd said, were unable to
work out whether she'd said "J" or "G" until they finally hit on the
idea of asking her to give another word starting with the same letter.

<surfs the net a while curiously> Oh, neat: there's a lecturer in
the University of Canterbury linguistics department who says "NZE is
now at an age when distinct regional differences may begin to emerge
and there's preliminary evidence suggesting that this is starting to
happen."
(http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/personal/darcy/projects.htm)
--She's in the process of gathering a corpus of data from speakers in
various regions which will allow her to determine whether or not it's
in fact happening.

(Ten years ago NZ linguists said there was no evidence for distinct
regional differences (always excepting the Southland burr), but
several years before that my best friend had come back from spending
a term on an exchange trip to Auckland and she had a distinct-to-me
accent.)

In the US, it's common for there to be differences between different
parts of the same city -- detectable to natives, but not to outsiders.

I can't tell a New Zealander talking to someone from elsewhere from an
Australian, and can barely tell either from a Londoner. But a New
Zealander talking to another New Zealander....

--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
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