BetterMost Community Blogs > Cellar Scribblings
Cellar Scribblings
CellarDweller:
Hiya Bettermost Friends!
Got to work on the earlier side, due to the rain that hitting the area. Weather here is supposed to be crazy the next few days!!!
Hope everyone else is doing well!!!
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on February 06, 2017, 12:06:30 pm ---Accents can vary so much.
--- End quote ---
I know! There are at least three different accents in Minnesota alone, two or three in New Orleans.
In trying to figure out the oo ew thing yesterday I looked up Amy Wallace on YouTube. She does great those tutorials of different accents. She's really good, but when it comes to the U.S. my suspicion is she doesn't break it down much further than maybe Southern, Western, probably a few different upper East Coast ones, Chicago and then Midwest in general.
Unfortunately, the videoI found wasn't even that nuanced. I think it was more like, "how to speak American" for non-American English speakers -- so basically newscasterspeak. Hugh Laurie might have found it useful preparing to play House.
She's the first one I ever heard talk about the Mid-Atlantic accent, which I had noticed in old movies and Twilight-Zone-era TV shows, but never in real life.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on February 07, 2017, 10:36:20 am ---I know! There are at least three different accents in Minnesota alone, two or three in New Orleans.
In trying to figure out the oo ew thing yesterday I looked up Amy Wallace on YouTube. She does great those tutorials of different accents. She's really good, but when it comes to the U.S. my suspicion is she doesn't break it down much further than maybe Southern, Western, probably a few different upper East Coast ones, Chicago and then Midwest in general.
Unfortunately, the video I found wasn't even that nuanced. I think it was more like, "how to speak American" for non-American English speakers -- so basically newscasterspeak. Hugh Laurie might have found it useful preparing to play House.
She's the first one I ever heard talk about the Mid-Atlantic accent, which I had noticed in old movies and Twilight-Zone-era TV shows, but never in real life.
--- End quote ---
One of my favorite TV hunks is the Australian actor Alex O'Loughlin (currently plays Steve McGarrett in the reboot of Hawaii Five-O). I've seen him in three different series, plus some guest roles, and in all of them I think he sounds like a thug from Chicago--not that I know any thugs from Chicago. ::)
Currently I'm watching the series Mercy Street on PBS (about a Union Army hospital in an appropriated hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1862). I've seen one writer remark that the Southern accents seem to vary even within one family--the Greens, who own the hotel that has been taken over for the hospital. I noticed that myself. I checked IMDb, and the series does have a "dialect coach," but it still seems to me that one of the daughters in the family is laying on the accent with a trowel, like a stereotypical Southern Belle, and I've wondered if any of the accents in the family are correct for Northern Virginia. Then, in this past Sunday's episode, two of the regular characters encountered a family of Quakers. If memory serves, the Quakers didn't have any Southern accent at all--yet they were Virginians!
And I'm glad I don't speak like a native Philadelphian. ... The natives around here seem to put a very nasal "a" before an "o" or an "ou," so that, for example, "house" comes out sounding like "haouse." Sounds awful. ...
CellarDweller:
accents are funny!
I've been told numerous times that I have a Pennsylvania accent (even though I don't spend much time there, my grandparents and parents were from Pa. originally).
serious crayons:
OK, I have another idea to explain the O thing.
How might an American pronounce "eau" as in eau de toilette? Or how do you think of, say, Julie Andrews pronouncing O?
Take those pronunciations, dial them back a bit, and then compare them to how the giant in Jack and the Bean Stalk would say "Fo" as in "Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!"
That's a little bit like the difference between a Coastal O and a Minnesota O.
Believe me, I was completely unaware of this myself, until a friend in New Orleans told me that a coworker was marveling over my accent (which again, seriously, is not particularly strong!). "Did you get how she says 'Minnesoooohhhhhta?" was the comment. That's when I started to notice there was another way to pronounce that vowel.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version