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English is weird

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Gyrre:
Yoder is still on maps and even has a bit of a tourist trap element to it now.

Definitely worth a visit for the food alone.

FreshScrod:
I just wrote the word "diaphragm" and noticed how strange it is. The g is silent, like in sign - I've known that g tends to be silent before n but this is the first time I'm noticing it silent elsewhere. Funnily enough, it's not silent in signature, or signatory, signal, signify, signet... I actually used to think it was spelled cygnet, I think because I read the title Dance of the Cygnets before hearing about cygnet signet rings.
But I'm pretty sure it's not the same as the silent g in enough. I think I read somewhere that it used to signify that the h is voiced.

David Alan Stern has a set audio programs, Acting with an Accent, for different accents. They're a couple hours each, and they do a good job explaining how the accent works, like in the mouth, stuff like center of resonance - taught in the accent, for immersion, which stood out to me, especially, because, each time, I thought that was their default accent. I haven't done all of them, though. Maybe they're American?
Tried various forum searches... didn't someone mention affecting an American accent? While playing a video game, but when they changed back to their usual (British?) accent, the other players didn't believe it was real. I might have daydreamed that, because I had a similar experience: a transfer student, for their whole first month, affected Received Pronunciation - pretty poorly but it fooled everyone - so they got alotta flak the week they changed back for "making fun of our [American] accent". To be honest, I was waiting for them to change to a third accent for the third month. They never did. I wonder if that might be interesting as part of a performance art piece. Maybe the same play, but with different accents for different acts or different performances.

Edits: removed unnecessary mention of gender, corrected markup error.

hedgie:
And here I always thought that a cygnet was a baby swan.

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: hedgie on 26 Nov 2020, 13:41 ---And here I always thought that a cygnet was a baby swan.

--- End quote ---

Presumably when cygnets are ringed for identification, it's done using cygnet rings...

Thrillho:
Well if we're talking about regional accents in the UK

I'm from the East Midlands, which is an area with accents heavily influenced by both the North East and West Midlands of the country, ending up somewhere weird in between.

Better yet, my parents are both from the Kent area, much further South. So what accent did I have? Well, if you ask my school friends, 'posh' would be the answer. I only realise with hindsight that I was middle class as fuck (my parents owned their house) despite feeling like we lacked many of the obvious trappings of being not-poor (Playstations, fashion labelled clothes). But I sounded very out of place in my comprehensive school, as an identifiably posh boy.

This as also given me a lifelong vowel problem. Depending on who I am talking to, the 'grass'/'grarse' sounds can both show up in the same sentence, because having been raised by 'grarse' parents in a 'grass' area I never really settled on one.

Then I moved to the North West, where anyone who had been to my hometown could pick me out, but then got confused why I didn't sound that much like it. Being in the North West also shoved a whole lot more of the working-class/Midlands elements into my speech than there used to be. And yet, I was always a 'Southerner.' Because I was from the South, you see. Because anything that isn't The North is The South, if you're a Northerner. Great.

Then I moved to Oxfordshire, in the South East. This is when Hodges met me, the only person who still frequents this forum regularly enough and has met me to be likely to comment. So I would be most interested to know what the fuck he thinks I sound like if anything. Around that area, I was noticeably too working-class/Northern sounding to fit in. I was now surrounded by people who were, generally, much posher-sounding than I was, and all of a sudden I became a Northerner.

Do people from Southampton call people from Northampton Northerners? I genuinely might want to know this. It drove me insane, in both places.

Now I live in Berkshire, which is both more posh than Oxfordshire (loads of people who work in London live here in ludicrously expensive houses) and then also less (the urbanised areas, however, are much more urban and run-down than those in Oxfordshire). Having now lived in the South of the country some eight years, when I visited my Northern friends a summer or two ago they were aghast at how Southern I sounded.

Sigh.

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